Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [133]
TEN
THE MEANS AND THE END
1950–1953
“I have nothing to sell. But myself. And no one wants that,” said Leo Kovalensky.
“I might,” said Kira Argounova.
The scornful arc [of his eyebrow] rose slowly. “Want to reverse our positions? Well, what price have you to offer?”
[Kira] raised her face to a ray of light.
“Look into my eyes,” she said very seriously. “What do you see there?”
He bent close to her. “They’re beautiful.”
“I have no other mirror to offer you.” She asked again: “What do you see there?”
“My own reflection.”
“That’s the price I’ll offer you.”
—From the first draft of We the Living,
written in April 1933
By the time the movie of The Fountainhead opened in July 1949, to moderate box-office success in theaters across the country, Warner Bros. was boasting that ten million Americans had read the novel. “Monumental Best-Seller! Towering Screen Triumph! The Love Fire That Blazed on Every Page of the Novel!” shouted the display posters. As the movie arrived in theaters in New York, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Des Moines, Dubuque, Detroit, Gulfport, and Galveston, the Bobbs-Merrill Company had ample books waiting in local bookstores. In three weeks, fifty thousand copies were sold. Notwithstanding the movie, in years to come The Fountainhead would continue to be promoted primarily by excited readers, and it gradually became a publishing legend. “It was the greatest word-of-mouth book I’ve ever been connected with,” said a Bobbs-Merrill sales manager named William Finneran in 1968, on the novel’s twenty-fifth anniversary. That year, total sales reached two and a half million copies. By the mid-2000s, the audience for the book was expanding again at a rate of 150,000 readers a year, with six million copies circulating. Although three generations of critics could hardly believe it, Ayn Rand’s newly patented fictional formula of “metaphysics, morality, politics, economics and sex,” as she described her novel in progress to an interviewer in 1948, clearly worked with readers.
Of all the readers and viewers of The Fountainhead, however, only one had personal meaning for her, she later said. This was a nineteen-year-old college freshman named Nathan Blumenthal. A few years after meeting her, he would legally change his name to Nathaniel Branden.
Like Thaddeus Ashby, Nathaniel Branden sent his favorite author a youthful fan letter. That was in the summer of 1949, the summer before he entered college. He was living in Winnipeg, Manitoba, twelve hundred miles from his home city of Toronto, and was working as a clerk in his uncle’s jewelry store while taking a year off between high school and college. He was trying to write a novel. The first time he had read The Fountainhead he had been fourteen. He had read the book forty times since then, and parts of it a hundred times. Hearing a sentence from any section, he could summarize, if not quote verbatim, the sentence that came before and the sentence that came after. With its lofty view of life’s possibilities, its elevation of independence and creative work, and its rejection of dreary conventionality, it had inspired him and given him a program for living. Its author had become the heroine of his teenaged years. He was planning to start college in California in the fall. He was writing to Rand to say that he would like to know more about her political and philosophical opinions, and particularly whether or not she believed in capitalism. Like Thaddeus Ashby, he received no answer.
In the late fall of 1949, near the end of his first semester at the University of California at Los Angeles, he tried again. This time, in reply to a question he asked, she mailed him a note listing her three published novels. Awestruck and hopeful, he sent another letter, a long one, praising The Fountainhead, posing questions about atheism, socialism, and free will, and pointing out what he thought might be inconsistencies in We the Living. Instead of being offended by this, she was so favorably impressed by his intelligence that she answered at length. She ended her