Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [116]
Like the Tchaikovsky movie, Top Secret was never produced. In March 1946, after she had completed her outline and written about a third of the shooting script, Wallis sold the rights to MGM, which was on the verge of filming its own movie about the bomb and wanted to quash a competing project. She was furious, not only because Wallis sent a secretary to give her the bad news but also because she figured out that he must have begun the project with a sale in mind. She wrote a second memo to the Boss, suggesting a moral (as opposed to a legal) agreement between them. From now on, she wanted greater up-front control in choosing her assignments and greater say-so in executing them. And she wanted Wallis to phone her directly, not through a functionary, if he thought she was behaving badly, unreasonably, or arrogantly. Whatever the reply was, she left the studio a week later. Although her contract called for her to work until the end of June, she signed off on March 25 and didn’t return until late September.
During her six-month leave at the ranch, she made her first extensive notes for the characters and plot of her fourth novel, her magnum opus, and drafted its first chapter.
Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s tour de force in support of American capitalism, has been described as a literary masterpiece, a philosophical detective story, and a prolonged tantrum against Neoplatonism, Christian brotherhood, and government regulation. It tells the story of a group of industrial titans who go on strike against an anticapitalist and increasingly totalitarian society. The time is a hazy version of the 1930s, and the mood is apocalyptic. The government, and the nation, are sliding toward collectivism. Industrialists are publicly derided as selfish fiends who grow rich off the labor of the poor. Washington bureaucrats manipulate industries by fiat and have begun to appropriate the capitalists’ products and profits—always “for the good of the people.” As the novel opens, the nation’s industrial titans have been vanishing slowly for twelve years. Now the pace of their disappearances is picking up. No one knows where they are going, or why. They are abandoning their mines, banks, and factories, which cannot go on functioning without their leadership and brains. As a result, industrial America is shutting down, and the nation is running short of coal, oil, steel, manufactured goods, electricity, and transportation. People seem eerily resigned to the economic collapse all this forebodes. As an expression of hopelessness, people ask one another, with a shrug, “Who is John Galt?” Where the question came from and what it means are a matter of indifference to those who ask it.
Amid the impending crisis, the novel’s high-spirited heroine, Dagny Taggart, strives to save her family’s great ancestral railroad, the New York—based Taggart Transcontinental Railroad. She is the vice-president of operations; her peevish, whining older brother James Taggart is nominally the president. While Dagny tries to keep thousands of miles of railroad track repaired with pieces of scrap metal and stretches the capacity of years-old diesel engines, James ingratiates himself with a clique of high-powered Washington officials, who bestow favors in return. He is a kind of inverse rendering of Peter Keating: having been born to money and position, he attempts to acquire self-esteem by giving them away. He hates and envies his competent younger sister but