Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [130]
Rand had taken a train during almost every important journey of her life. Yet she admitted to Paterson that, as an adult, at least, she had often felt a nagging dread of railroad accidents. “I have seldom enjoyed anything concrete or in the present tense,” she wrote. “That locomotive ride was one of the very few times when I enjoyed the moment for its own sake.” This is a startling statement and provides an insight into Rand’s enormous drive and habitual placement of all real joy and satisfaction in the future. In Atlas Shrugged, she leaves it to Dagny to explain the connection between anxiety and the uncharted present moment. At the throttle on the John Galt Line, “she [Dagny] wondered why she felt safer here, where it seemed as if, should an obstacle arise, her breast and the glass shield [of the front window] would be first to smash against” the looming obstacle. Then Dagny understands: “It was the security of being first, with full sight and full knowledge of one’s course…. It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust, but to know.” Alone in command of a powerful machine, not unlike her mind, Rand and her character were most alive.
As they exchanged letters in early 1948 they traded compliments—until they started trading barbs. In response to something Paterson wrote, which has been lost, Rand mailed off a terse tract against Catholics (“those people”) and the emphasis they placed on suffering. The older woman asked how Rand could indict all “those people”—hundreds of millions of Catholics—without risk of indicting the entire human race. Easily, Rand replied, echoing Nietzsche: even if every person in the world other than she became a Christian, a socialist, or any other kind of collectivist “altruist,” the greatness of man would be vindicated by the lone remaining rationalist. In another letter, Paterson unwisely mused that she, Paterson, might well be the only person “alive or dead” who really understood capitalism. Rand answered testily, “Does it really seem to you that I haven’t been born yet?” Still resentful over the perceived failure of her former elder “sister” to give her credit in The God of the Machine, she reminded Paterson that, until she had explained that altruism asks the impossible of men, Paterson believed that altruism was an ideal to which to aspire. Paterson denied that she had ever said such a thing and then moderated the argument with a jest: Altruism was like sawdust, she wrote, in that both were indigestible to humans. Rand became conciliatory. She conceded to having learned the practical aspects of capitalism from Paterson, and apologized in case she had wrongly remembered their conversation. Never in her life had she doubted her memory, which added a note of grace to the concession.
Rand was midway through her screenplay when Paterson phoned to say that she was coming to California. The reason for her visit was to raise money for a new magazine, which would be edited by their common friends John Chamberlain of Fortune and Henry Hazlitt of Newsweek. The magazine was to be called The Freeman in honor of Albert Jay Nock’s 1920s libertarian weekly and would advocate free-market politics and economics. Rand liked the idea; since Willkie’s defeat, she had believed that serious conservative thinkers needed a serious public forum. If she would furnish introductions to her high-powered conservative friends in Hollywood, Paterson proposed to do her best to win their financial backing for the magazine.
Rand seemed genuinely pleased by the prospect of a visit from her friend. She paid Paterson’s plane fare and invited her to stay for ten days at the ranch. Rand’s affection for Paterson at this point is unmistakable. She wrote to the older woman that she hoped to be finished with the screenplay by the time Paterson arrived. If Paterson could be on the set when the first camera shot was taken, “it will be a wonderful philosophical omen,” she wrote. As it happened, the shooting didn’t begin until Paterson was back in New York, but Rand had rarely