Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [120]
In this initial stage of note making, before the plot and characters were fully formed, she was imagining her heroes and villains as new variations on earlier characters or as aspects of her acquaintances and friends. John Galt, like Howard Roark, had always been in her mind, she said. She was basing Dagny Taggart largely on her own temperament but endowing the railroad heiress with more physical skill and courage. Dagny’s “hunger for her own kind of world,” like Rand’s, she noted, is why “she works so fiercely. … She knows she can have her world only by creating it.” As for the strikers, she developed their traits by analyzing the people closest to her. Her husband was the sort of finely tuned man who simply stops functioning, or functions only minimally in an occupation not his own, when forced to live in a morally corrupt society, she noted; the nondescript blue-collar jobs that many of the heroes regularly work at while on strike from their real professions are based on this view of O’Connor and his working life. Of Walter Abbott, her young playwright protégé, whom she would later remember as a ne’er-do-well, she now wrote, “[He is] the sensitive, poetic kind of writer who spends his time writing bloody thrillers” for the movies. “He thinks this is all he has a chance at. That is his form of being on strike.” (No particular character in Atlas Shrugged seems to have been modeled after him.) She cast a cooler eye on the attributes of Frank Lloyd Wright and Isabel Paterson. Although she continued to view Wright as “a Roark” in his work, she thought his “desire to be a ‘god’” among the lesser mortals who surrounded him undercut his integrity and placed him squarely in the camp of the new novel’s parasites. Paterson’s mistake was of a different kind. Loving justice and finding it nowhere, Rand observed, the older woman had given up all hope of living in a rational world or of gaining any valid recognition for herself. As a result, Rand wrote in a passage that would have been breathtaking had she written it about herself, “She knows that she cannot reach her enemies, the irrational ones, by her proper weapon, the mind; so she turns upon her friends, wreaking upon them the very thing she should hate, the thing which has hurt her—the irrational.” (Interestingly, Galt, too, will battle his friends and allies, such as Dagny, by targeting the producers who continue to work and benefit the looters.) While contemplating the attributes she had in common with John Galt, she wrote, “I think I represent the proper integration of a complete human being.”
She was also going out and entertaining. During her two and a half years in Hollywood, she had collected a sizable group of politically conservative friends. They were interested in her evolving ideas about capitalism and government and offered help in promoting her ideas and her work. One of these friends was Leonard Read, who headed the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce until 1945, when he left to manage the National Industrial Conference Board in New York City. Shortly after Rand’s arrival, in the winter of 1944, he had given a dinner party in her honor, introducing her to a dozen prominent West Coast businessmen who, by the evening’s end, were favorably impressed with her originality and fervor. One evening in the spring of 1946, while Read was visiting Los Angeles from New York, he and William Mullendore, one of the dozen businessmen, dined at the ranch. A former special assistant for commerce to President Herbert Hoover, Mullendore presided over the Southern California Edison electric company and was highly regarded among free-market champions as a brilliant and accomplished speaker. The two men and their hostess were enjoying a rousing conversation about economic liberty, Read recalled, when Mullendore announced that he wanted to write a book about how a 100 percent collectivist society would, in practice, make most ordinary economic activity impossible. Rand responded, “I have written such a book. It is called Anthem. It was written in 1937.