Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [113]
In her public statements, O’Connor was still at the center of her emotional life. Passive or not, he had believed in her when she was almost without hope, and he had always put her writing first. He was “the only exception” to the rule that “nothing has ever mattered to me too much” other than creative work, she wrote in an open letter “To the Readers of The Fountainhead.” He was Howard Roark, she claimed, “or as near to it as anyone I know.”
NINE
THE TOP AND THE BOTTOM
1946–1949
The average man doesn’t have the strength to do what is right at any cost, against all men. Only the genius can do that. The genius clears the way for the average man.
—Journals of Ayn Rand, 1946
To the Readers of The Fountainhead” began the building of Ayn Rand’s public legend. This small pamphlet self-consciously depicted a woman who had been a prodigy from childhood, whose ideas were entirely her own, and whose primary values were intelligence, ambition, ideas, and achievement. It was here that she first confided her decision to be a writer at the age of nine. From that time forward, she declared, “I had in my mind a blinding picture of people as they could be,” suggesting that real people held little meaning for her. With memorable self-assurance, she added that her reason for creating the character of Howard Roark was not to “serve my fellow man” or to “save the world,” but to obtain the purely private pleasure of writing about a kind of man she could admire; she didn’t add: in a world she could control.
The Bobbs-Merrill Company commissioned “To the Readers of The Fountainhead” in the fall of 1945, when the novel was again climbing the best-seller lists. It was mailed to thousands of fans who continued to write to the author, care of the publisher, with questions concerning her background and the character of her hero. It communicated as much about her self-concept as about her life. “When I am asked about myself,” she wrote, “I am tempted to say, paraphrasing Roark, ‘Don’t ask me about my family, my childhood, my friends, or my feelings. Ask me about the things I think.’” Except by searching in old newspapers, readers could not know that she was born outside the United States, let alone in Russia; most never learned that she was Jewish, a background she did not bestow on any of her scores of characters. “I have no hobbies,” she continued. “I have few friends. I do not like to go out.” When she declared that twelve publishers had rejected The Fountainhead before Bobbs-Merrill had agreed to publish it, her tone contained a note of pride at being a triumphant outsider. She included Knopf in her count, although it hadn’t rejected the book so much as refused to extend her deadline for a second time. She also included two or three publishing houses that had seen only an early, incomplete outline, not the text, and she didn’t mention that her first publisher, Macmillan, had offered her an advance that she turned down. Her disciples would accept and repeat the story of The Fountainhead’s twelve rejections hundreds of times over the years, both as a symbol of the hardships she had endured at the hands of timid or imperceptive editors and as an implicit compliment to her independent-minded readers. Likewise, they would cite the struggles she listed here: working as a waitress, an office clerk, and a reader for film companies before she could earn her living as a writer. In a rational world, she seemed to say, she would have been spared such experiences. Perhaps she felt this more deeply because some of the menial jobs she held would have been unthinkable in the world of her childhood. In any case, she was not of the view that these experiences had helped her with her writing or the development of her ideas. She was not writing about the folks next door, in offices and diners. “I am interested in men only as they reflect philosophical