Ayn Rand

Mimi R. Gladstein

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781623566739
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Ideologies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand was one of the most influential 20th century advocates of free market capitalism. Her work inspired Objectivism, a philosophical movement and former US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan cited Rand as a formative intellectual influence. In this outstanding volume, Mimi Gladstein details Rand's belief in the moral supremacy of individualism over collectivism, highlighting her contribution to libertarian thought.

1

The Life

Ayn Rand was a polarizing and controversial person in life, and her personality and ideas are of such dynamism and force that even a quarter century after her death, she still provokes strong emotions and controversy. Those who reject her ideas are strident and derisive in their condemnation. Her adherents are just as passionately committed to the power of their convictions. However, even among those who accept the validity of many of her views, there is division and denunciation. The Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) in California maintains the archives of her possessions and approves publication of works about her life and writing. On the other coast of the United States, The Atlas Society: Center for Objectivism promotes her ideas through summer study courses, publications, and the occasional anniversary celebration of her works. The most recent was a one day seminar in Washington DC, cosponsored by the Cato Institute, for the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Atlas Shrugged. The ARI conducted its celebration with a fiftieth anniversary exhibit and a series of discussion groups through the 2007 fall season at a regional library in Hollywood. Antipathy between these groups has been deep-seated, and even in a new era of leadership there are few signs of rapprochement.

The source of these towering passions was born Alisa Zinovievna Rosenbaum in 1905 in St. Petersburg, Russia.¹ Raised in a largely secular household of Jewish descent, Rand rejected religion at a relatively young age, declaring herself an atheist in her early teens. Her youth was both privileged and precarious. Before World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution the Rosenbaums traveled abroad and took vacations at seaside resorts; after Zinovy Zacharovich Rosenbaum's pharmacy was nationalized and their comfortable living quarters appropriated by the state, their standard of living deteriorated considerably.

Rand's intellectual powers and strong will were evident from an early age. Her recollections of self are of a girl who was the opposite of her mother, a graceful, social person, not very interested in ideas. “I was antisocial. I was insufficiently interested in other children” (quoted in Branden 1986, Passion, 5). One friend she does recall, a relationship based on the sharing of ideas, politics specifically, is the sister of Vladimir Nabakov. Chris Sciabarra, who made an extensive study of Rand's Russian roots, theorizes that the girls must have attended the Stoiunin Gymnasium, an avant-garde school designed to prepare girls for the university (69).² Evidence of Rand's precocious intellect is her enrollment in the University at age 16 and graduation three years later. From her early years, Rand's abiding interest was the world of the mind. She always insisted that to know her, the most important thing was to know her ideas, not her family history. In her earliest public autobiographical musings, she recalls that intelligence was the quality in others that she cared the most about.

Rand's interest in literature was also stimulated in her childhood. Her archetypal image of a hero was shaped when at age nine she fell in love with Cyrus Paltons, the heroic protagonist of a boy's magazine serialization of The Mysterious Valley by Maurice Champagne. Both the hero's exploits and the illustrations depicting him as tall, lean, and long-legged suggest a pattern Rand's heroes would embody. The plots she was most drawn to were those that centralized the battle between good and evil. “I believe there is only one story in the world” wrote John Steinbeck in East of Eden. "We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil" (475, 477).³ For Ayn Rand the contest was not so much within the self as against the forces of evil in the world, although some of her most interesting characters must struggle first with the battle within. As the girl Alisa matured, the novels of Victor Hugo enthralled her and she came early to “the idea that writing would be the defining passion of her life and the career she would pursue as an adult” (Britting 2004, 8).

Two other artistic media were, after reading, the main sources of Rand's aesthetic pleasures. Rand credits the discovery of operettas with saving her life. Their presentation of what she called “a benevolent-universe shot in the arm” (quoted in B. Branden 1986, 46) brought much-needed respite in the throes of the dank and dismal Russian collectivist state. Among her favorites were Millocher's The Beggar Student, Offenbach's Grand Duchess, and Lehar's The Song of the Lark. Her other great joy came from going to the movies—a pastime that would lead her far from the drab existence of a tour guide in the Peter and Paul fortress, across an ocean and a continent to Hollywood and the launching of her writing career.

Rand's high school years were spent in the Crimea where a pre-Soviet system of education still maintained. This was during the period of the Russian Revolution (1918-1921), and the Rosenbaums still had hopes that their situation might be restored to some normalcy. In high school, Rand studied Aristotle and the American political system of individual rights, two topics that left indelible impressions on her. When the Red army finally defeated the White in the Crimea, the Rosenbaum family returned to St. Petersburg, now Petrograd.

The location of the Rosenbaum home afforded the young Alisa a ringside seat to the early machinations that led from a revolution for freedom to the establishment of a totalitarian state. Alexandr Fedorovich Kerenski, who headed a provisional government, became her first real life hero. However, his struggles to create a viable democratic state were undermined by the Bolsheviks who attacked Petrograd and took power. Kerenski escaped to the west, a direction his hero-worshiper would follow. When they met many years later in New York, her illusions about him had evaporated.

The early years of the establishment of the Soviet Union were times of privation and purges. Food was scarce; the Rosenbaum family savings were quickly depleted. Although he tried to practice his profession, Zinovy Zacharovich, who had once owned a pharmacy, became a clerk in one far from his home. Anna Rosenbaum became a teacher of languages in high school. At one point, because of her family's bourgeois status, Alisa and many of her friends were to be expelled from the university. A quirk of fate caused them to be reinstated when a visiting delegation of British scientists heard about the impending purge. Because of the desire of the new regime to impress them, some of the students, Rand among them, were allowed to complete their degrees.

At the University, Alisa chose, over her father's objections, to major in history. He wanted her to have a profession such as medicine or engineering. The one professor Rand would mention by name when she recalled her university education was N. O. Lossky, with whom she studied ancient philosophy. In her recollections for a series of interviews prior to the writing of the biographical essay, “Who Is Ayn Rand?” Rand remembers that Lossky was a Platonist who did not think highly of female students. Nonetheless, he gave her a “Perfect” on her final exam.⁴ Rand's intellect developed as she sharpened her mental teeth, both rejecting and interpolating the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Nietzsche.

After the university, Alisa enrolled in the State Institute for Cinematography: her purpose, to learn screenwriting. After only one year in the program, she received permission to visit relatives in America and thus never studied screenwriting, as it was part of the second year of the program. Many years after Rand's death, the Ayn Rand Institute published translations and copies of her Russian writings on Hollywood.⁵ In effect, although she did not list these works on her vitae, they are interesting as her earliest publications.

The person, who was to be known as Ayn Rand, celebrated her twenty-first birthday in transit to a new life and a new identity. Anna Borisovna, the mother with whom she shared so little sensibility, was perceptive and caring enough to arrange for an invitation from relatives in Chicago and to pay for the transit by selling her jewelry. Both Alisa and her mother were aware that a person of Rand's beliefs would not fare well in Soviet Russia. Again, fortuitous timing worked in Rand's favor. Travel restrictions on students had been temporarily eased in the transition from Lenin's to a new economic policy. As Rand's relatives owned a silent film theatre, it could be convincingly argued that Rand was going to the United States to study film. The actual birthday occurred in Berlin where she visited with her cousin Vera Guzarchik, a medical student.

Alice Rosenbaum, the name on her liner ticket stub, arrived in New York harbor on February 19, 1926. She was never to return to her birthplace, a country she was to characterize as "the ugliest and incidentally, the most mystical country on earth."⁶ As a student in Leningrad, she expressed strong anti-Soviet sentiments until such time as she feared that her remarks might endanger her family. Once she had left Russia, she was to devote much of her life to revealing the tyranny, drudgery, and soul-destroying evil of the Soviet state. In her first novel and in subsequent nonfiction writing, she argued effectively about the disastrous consequences of collectivism, inveighing against the rationalizations by socialists and their liberal sympathizers of Soviet atrocities and rule of terror. “Complete loathing” is the expression she chose to describe how she felt about Russia.

Rand's sojourn with her Chicago relatives was brief. Although she credits them with providing a lifeline for her, once she left Chicago she did not maintain strong family ties. Barbara Branden theorizes that because the Portnoy/Satrin/Goldberg families were deeply steeped in living within their religious traditions—attending synagogue, maintaining strong family ties—they were not people with whom Rand felt she had much in common. Their values were not her values (Passion, 72). However, even though her visitor's visa had expired, her Chicago relatives provided a letter of introduction to someone in the Cecil B. DeMille Studio, bought her a train ticket, and gave Rand money for a new start in California.

It was at this juncture in her life that Alisa Rosenbaum became Ayn Rand. According to most sources, the name Ayn was chosen even before she reached America. Its derivation is Finnish. A Chicago cousin, Fern Brown, a successful writer herself, remembers an old Remington-Rand typewriter as inspiring the choice for a last name. According to Brown, Rand wanted to maintain her initials AR and preferred Ayn Rand to Ayn Remington. Impact, the ARI newsletter, cites letters from family in Russia that refer to the name “Rand” even before they heard from her in America. They cite a New York Evening Post article that quotes Rand to that effect. In the Cyrillic spelling of her name are resemblances to both the names “Ayn” and “Rand.” After leaving Chicago and starting a new life in California, only a few of her closest friends in the early days knew her birth name. During the zenith of her career it was not referred to, even by her inner coterie. It was only in 1983, during research for her book-length biography, that Barbara Branden discovered it. It had not been included in the early “official” biographical essay.

Rand was remarkably confident in herself for a young immigrant woman whose security in a new country was tenuous at best. One of her mother's early letters recounts the departure scene and Alisa assuring her family that when she would return, she would be famous. Ann Borisovna writes that her father Zinovy concurred, remarking after the train departed that he was sure his daughter would show the world. By the time she left Chicago for Hollywood, Rand had written four screenplays in English, a language she had not quite mastered.

Once settled in the Hollywood Studio Club for women, a residence that provided inexpensive living for the likes of Donna Reed, Rita Moreno, Kim Novak, and Norma Jean Baker before she was Marilyn Monroe, Rand again was the beneficiary of amazingly fortuitous timing. Just at the moment she was dejectedly exiting the DeMille lot when the letter of introduction proved no entry to a job, Cecil B. DeMille drove by and gave her a ride to the set of King of Kings, which was then in production. His purpose was to show her how a movie is made—a necessary preparation if she wanted to be a screenwriter. After a number of days of watching, DeMille offered Rand her first job in Hollywood as an extra in his film about the life of Jesus Christ, rich irony for a woman who was to be one of the country's most adamant atheists.

Another quirk of fate put in her path, during this first job in her adopted country, the man who was to be her husband till the end of his life, just three years before the end of hers. When asked about her lack of belief in an afterlife on the Phil Donahue show, she remarked that if she believed there was an afterlife, she would immediately kill herself so that she could be with her beloved husband. When they met, he was also an extra in the DeMille movie. For Rand it was love at first sight. Before she knew a thing about him, she had decided that he had her kind of face— aloof, aristocratic, strong, independent, cold, and graceful. It is a look that would be replicated in some measure in many of her heroic protagonists.

Frank O'Connor was, by most accounts, a handsome, kind, gentle, and decent man. He was an actor who never achieved much success in the field, although he appeared in a few movies in the early 1930s. People who knew him describe him as a passive man, rarely the major breadwinner in the marriage. After DeMille's studio closed, Ayn and Frank met again, by chance in a public library. Their relationship developed and on April 15 of 1929, shortly before her extended visa was about to expire, they were married by a judge in Los Angeles, going to Mexicali some months later so she could reenter the country as the wife of an American citizen. As soon as she could, she applied for citizenship.⁷

The early days for the O'Connors were difficult. Before the marriage, Rand had worked for DeMille as a junior screenwriter, doing treatments and synopses of others' works. Her own scenarios were dismissed as improbable and unrealistic. When DeMille closed his studio, Rand was reduced to working whatever jobs she could find, such as waiting tables and stuffing envelopes. In 1929 she got a position in the wardrobe department of RKO Pictures as a filing clerk. Although it certainly wasn't the kind of work she desired, the pay was steady and consistent with her ethics of the importance of fair value, she did a good enough job that she was promoted to head of the department within a year. All this time, she continued working on her own writing projects.

The economy and the intellectual zeitgeist could not have been worse for a writer of Rand's philosophical bent. It is testimony to her perseverance and integrity that she was able to prevail. Shortly after her marriage, the crash of 1929 sent the economy into a tailspin. Concurrently, in what is often referred to as the “Red Decade,” the preponderance of the artistic and intellectual classes promulgated leftist, collectivist, and communist themes. Rand, who had seen collectivism in action, was appalled. How could it be that in this country that she had come to in order to get away from the suffocating strictures of communism, the intelligentsia were advocating many of the same collectivist and statist measures as brought privation and stultification in Russia? Rand thought that Americans were obviously not adequately knowledgeable about the dangers and reality of communism. Thus, spurred on by Frank and his brothers, she set about to write a novel that would tell the American public what was really occurring in Russia. A story goes that before she left Russia, a man at her farewell party told her to tell the world what was actually happening behind what later came to be known as the “Iron Curtain.” Tell them Russia is a large cemetery and that we are slowly dying he told her. We the Living is her fulfillment of her promise to do so.

Airtight is the original title for what eventually became We the Living, Rand's first published novel. In some ways, that title is more expressive of the cemetery and coffin imagery evoked by the impetus of her promise. The Russia she depicts shuts its citizens into an airtight coffin from which there is no escape. Begun in 1930 and finally published in 1936, although it was finished some years earlier, Rand defined We the Living as the closest work to an autobiography that she would ever write. As originally published, the novel is remarkable for Rand's ability to communicate analytically and creatively in a newly learned language. Few writers are able to accomplish this: Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabakov are the ones who come to mind. Once she had become famous, Rand made some revisions to the original text. She claims that they were “minimal.” However, a comparison of the 1936 and the 1959 editions suggest more "substantial and substantive changes."⁸

To develop her writing skills during this early period of her professional life, Rand read extensively. Most contemporary writers did not appeal to her, but the works of O. Henry did. His trademark plot twists and lighthearted style as well as his novel and ingenious take on things appealed to Rand. She described his main characteristic as “pyrotechnical virtuosity of an inex...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor's Preface
• 1 The Life
• 2 An Exposition of Rand's Ideas
• 3 Reception and Influence of Rand's Work
• 4 Contemporary Relevance
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index