Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [14]
This was “the first most important event in my life socially, which made me see that it’s not significant why some people, who seem to be individualistic, get along with the crowd, and I don’t,” she later said. “I had thought she was a serious girl and that she was after serious things, but she was just conventional and ordinary, a mediocrity, and she didn’t mean anything as a person. It was really like a fallen idol.”
Rand wasn’t antisocial; she would have liked to have a friend. But her quick dismissals of people based on what she saw as fatal flaws in character or thinking would form a pattern in her life. In the face of disappointment, she was unable or unwilling to ask herself why a girl she had admired, for example, would give a silly or sentimental answer to a serious question. Could the girl have misunderstood what Rand was after? Could she simply have been startled? Could she have had an interesting reason for what she said? Rand did not ponder the context of the girl’s response, nor did she dig deeper to see what she could learn. People were either exceptional or ordinary, her kind of people or nonentities. Later, she would call herself a hero-worshiper, and it’s no accident that she spoke of this girl as “a fallen idol.” Her romantic tendencies caused her to overestimate some people and underestimate others. She rarely reconsidered. Her readings of people who disappointed her would only harden and darken over time.
Her ambitions were set. By her tenth birthday, she was writing novels at home and in school. At Stoiunin, she sat in the back of the class, a book propped in front of her to disguise what she was doing, and wrote. She finished four novels by the age of eleven, each of which featured a heroine who was exactly her own age. The surface similarities stopped there. Foreshadowing Dagny Taggart and Dominique Francon, these first heroines were tall and long-legged, with bobbed hair and blue eyes. One was named Thunder (“Rpom”). Another, from the same year—1915, the gruesome second year of World War I, when Russian military losses had already exceeded a million men and England was in danger of being invaded by Germany—was an English girl who argued her way into the British Royal Navy and single-handedly machine-gunned down the entire German fleet. Such lone heroism and unflinching use of violence are more familiar in boys’ stories than in girls’, but this was to be Rand’s pattern: to assume the preferences and prerogatives of the men of her time.
Cyrus’s influence can be seen in this story, of course, but so, perhaps, can that of Joan of Arc, whom Rand considered the most heroic woman in history. Why? Because she “stood alone against everyone, even to the point of death,” explained a longtime friend of Rand’s. Whenever necessary, so would Ayn Rand.
The child was aware that these early stories were “just for her;” she didn’t expect to publish anything until she was grown up, she said. But she did expect to publish. So by the age of ten she was pursuing what she already thought of as her future career. As her mother wrote to her many years later, “You [always] planned to be greater than Columbus.”
If Anna hoped that young Rand would make friends among the hand-picked students at Stoiunin, she was for the most part disillusioned. Rand stood on the outside of her peer group, proudly, bitterly, self-consciously alone. She hated the stocky shape of her developing body, which she felt didn’t accord with her essence, but she was proud of her mind. She told herself that she took life and ideas more seriously than the other girls and that her values, especially her all-consuming passion for Cyrus, were superior to theirs. She was “left strictly alone,” she said. In spite of her proud defiance, she was again desperately lonely. She longed to find her kind of people, and, for now, to do so meant she had to make them up in stories. And so emerged the three-dimensional world of Ayn Rand, where idealized characters take the measure of reality and often find