Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [132]
On the night of the Mullendore incident, Paterson offered to go home early. Rand and Frank didn’t plead with her to stay. The next morning, Paterson made a show of not knowing how to change the date of her airplane ticket. If she was hinting that she wanted to stay, her hostess didn’t take the bait. O’Connor chauffeured Paterson to the airport, Rand sitting silently up front while Paterson chatted from the back about books and authors and New York literary life. Listening to but not answering the kind of small talk she had always hated, Rand decided that Paterson was “gone” psychologically. She was “no good.”
Rand and her first and only mentor saw each other once again, in February 1959, shortly before Paterson’s death. Paterson, then seventy-three and down at the heel, came to Rand’s New York apartment to ask her former friend for help in finding a publisher for her final novel, Joyous Gard. Isolated and regretful about the past, she also hoped to reignite their friendship, according to her biographer. Rand was not interested. She went right to the point, explaining without rancor that the novel was too dated, too old-fashioned, to be published. Then she gradually turned the conversation to what Paterson had thought of Atlas Shrugged, which had been published in 1957. The undiplomatic Paterson admitted that she had reservations about the novel’s treatment of man as a purely rational being—their old dispute. One of Rand’s disciples was in the room when Paterson said good-bye. She appeared burned out, sour, and defeated, he recalled. Rand was at the pinnacle of her fame. He couldn’t imagine what Rand and the older woman had ever had in common.
Neither could Rand. When she later spoke of Paterson—infrequently, according to acquaintances—her comments were derisive. Close friends had no idea that Paterson had once been Rand’s most intimate friend, let alone her mentor. By 1959, the novelist seemed to have forgotten that Paterson had taught her anything or helped her in any significant way. As time went on, “she could not say that she had been crucially helped by anybody,” said a close friend from the 1950s and 1960s. She was grateful to her parents for freeing her from Russia, but she never mentioned the hundreds of supportive letters she had received from them in the 1920s and early 1930s or the gifts and loans extended by her mother’s relatives in Chicago. When she spoke of her neighbor Marcella Bannert, she recalled her as the social-climbing paradigm for Peter Keating, not as the woman who had helped her to find a home for Red Pawn. “No one helped me, nor did I think at any time that it was anyone’s duty to help me,” she would write in her author’s note in Atlas Shrugged.
However decidedly Paterson was to blame for the final falling-out between the two women, Rand’s demotion of her friend to the status of a minor player in her life was a template for broken relationships to come. In large measure, her partings from people were based on principled complaints about those people’s premises (philosophical beliefs) and behavior, but once banished, they had as little reality for her as Ellsworth Toohey had for Howard Roark. “If she didn’t love it,” or still love it, “it couldn’t be great,” said a friend. “She was not interested in process,” said another, mildly. Yet she never stopped recommending the books she loved, including Paterson’s The God of the Machine.
The price of being her friend went up. From these years onward, she required at least fundamental agreement with a system of political and moral ideas that would finally enter the world at large with Atlas