Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [139]
Barbara’s concern about a mind-body split came directly from Rand’s discussions of romantic love with them while she was writing the chapter of Atlas Shrugged in which Dagny and Hank Rearden have their first sexual encounter. For just as she had devised a theory of the emotions emphasizing reason, so, through the character of Francisco, she proposed a theory of sex based on rational self-interest, the keystone of free-market economics. What she came up with is best illustrated by the predicament of Rearden, the novel’s most complex and sympathetic character.
Like Roark, Rearden has a strong sex drive; unlike Roark, he has a wife, Lillian, who has reinforced an old idea, that sex is an animal function that only degenerate males want or need. Interestingly, like Rand’s mother prior to the revolution, Lillian’s greatest pleasure lies in giving parties and playing hostess to fashionable intellectuals, such as Balph Eubank and Simon Pritchett, who are amusingly skewered in Rand’s dialogue. Lillian’s sexual scorn sends Rearden into throes of agony over his desire for Dagny. Francisco, seeing him suffer later in the novel, sets him right. “Love is our response to our highest values,” he explains. “Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life.” For the hero, then, there is no conflict between the desires of the body and the convictions of the mind. A productive man wants to celebrate his accomplishments and self-esteem in sexual ecstasy with a worthy woman. Moreover, women such as Dagny—and Kira, and Dominique, and presumably Rand—hardly dislike sex. They long to be man worshippers with their bodies and their souls and to mate with the highest possible types of men. Hearing this, Rearden begins to set himself free from his wife’s malignant grasp and to see how the novel’s other villains use his most praiseworthy moral strengths and values against him.
Much later, an older Barbara told a journalist that Rand’s doctrine of man worship made her “want to crawl under a rug.” By then, Barbara had concluded that it was personal longing that had prompted Rand to identify femininity with hero worship: Because she almost always saw further and penetrated more deeply than others did and thus was painfully alone, she longed to find and to yield to a strength greater than her own. As much to the point, perhaps, Rand’s theory of sex seemed to require any truly sane man to be in love with her, since she was the worthiest woman of them all.
In this context, twenty-year-old Barbara became convinced that her ambivalence about Branden was, at best, a sign of confused thinking and a lack of self-esteem. At worst, it was a moral failure. She made a promise to herself to change her thinking.
Meanwhile, for months the two students had been pleading with Rand to tell them more about the novel. Late in the summer of 1950, she gave them eighteen completed chapters to read and watched as they sped through them, page by page. Then she began reading aloud to them from the chapters she was working on. Once a week, in the evening, she, they, and O’Connor—who had already heard each new section as it was being written—gathered in the living room. The young people listened, spellbound, as Nick Carter had once listened to The Fountainhead.
Entering into Rand’s epic narrative of principled resistance to the destruction of the American spirit by small-minded collectivists was like landing on another planet whose bedrock was individual achievement. Describing the power of the book for Branden and herself, Barbara wrote, “We were hearing, on each page, a command to rise to heights of greater nobility than we had ever conceived. We felt that we were now citizens of a world in which man’s mind was efficacious and the human potential was unlimited.” As for the author of this world, Barbara said, “I can’t fully communicate the exhilaration of being in intimate contact with so great a mind and spirit.”
Still, away from the book a few things puzzled and disturbed them. One was a thin edge