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By Root 1806 0

humanitarians will sooner or later halt production by turning everyone into a needy person—a dependent baby—in an effort to increase their own sense of power. If the baby lives and production ceases, whither the baby? At the time, Paterson had explained that she didn’t want to mention Rand’s name in print because she disliked footnotes; and the inexperienced writer was pleased and flattered that her older, better-known friend wished to mention and publicize her ideas. She was reassured by the fact that Paterson had privately described her basic insight—that human reason, not an impossibly good deity, is the basis of morality—as the most important ethical discovery since Christianity. But after the publication of the book, Rand became increasingly suspicious of Paterson’s motives. In the published copy, the older woman had acknowledged the contributions of a number of prominent people. Why not Rand? Was it because she was not yet famous in 1942 and 1943? Because Paterson wanted to present the younger woman’s ideas as her own? As Rand brooded on the matter, Paterson’s decision not to give her credit struck her as enormously improper. That she hadn’t yet confronted her friend in person or in writing was a mark of how deep were her deference and attachment.

If Rand’s final dismissal of Paterson’s musings on God as a creative force offended the older woman, so did the lengthening intervals between Rand’s letters. Paterson felt neglected. Rand felt harassed. The correspondence between them became more frequent again in the summer of 1945, and they carried on a kind of epistolary lovers’ quarrel. In one letter that July, Rand boasted that The Fountainhead’s sales had now topped 150,000 copies, injudiciously reminding Paterson that she had set a goal of one hundred thousand copies. Paterson remembered, all right. She replied that “sometimes I [think] you might [be] more tactful” in proclaiming the triumphs of The Fountainhead, since she, Paterson, had to see the book displayed in bookstore windows all over New York, while The God of the Machine “could not sell at all.”

Most inflammatory, perhaps, were Paterson’s repeated attempts to browbeat Rand into giving up “the dope you take.” “Stop taking that benzedrine, you idiot,” she wrote in July 1945. “I don’t care what excuse you have—stop it.” Rand’s reply is missing from the archived correspondence, but she seems to have defended herself by insisting on the pressure she was under to produce good work on deadline, her exhaustion, low spirits brought on by the spread of Communist influence in Hollywood, and her doctor’s willingness to write prescriptions. Paterson responded, “I am seriously vexed with you for believing such nonsense as that the dope you take won’t hurt you because a doctor told you so.” She added, “Don’t take that stuff to work on. If you persist, believe me, you are running into a perfectly hellish time within a few years.” At one point, she issued a mock warning: “If you take any more of that benzedrine I will come out there and spank you to a blister.” Paterson didn’t visit until 1948 and probably wouldn’t have made any headway if she had. Rand would continue to use amphetamines for the next three decades.

Late that summer, Rand and O’Connor made the first of two or three trips back to New York to confer with her agent and publisher. She looked forward to seeing Paterson, but the two women must have argued, for after that their correspondence stopped abruptly and didn’t resume for many months. She also visited Eugene Lyons of Reader’s Digest, who invited her to a party in his apartment, where she encountered the political idol of her early adolescence, the former Russian prime minister Aleksandr Kerensky. He was now in his sixties, immaculately dressed, with thick glasses and a slight stoop. Introduced, they spoke in Russian. As they discussed their native land, she wondered if he would express second thoughts, or possibly regret, about his government’s failure to take seriously enough the Bolshevik threat in 1917. Instead, she listened, appalled, as he prattled