• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1601 0

of anger they sometimes glimpsed in Rand. Two or three times, Barbara experienced the sting of Rand’s displeasure—once, when she mentioned her love of the mountains and the ocean, which the writer interpreted as a rejection of “man,” and another time when she praised the work of Thomas Wolfe, which, in Rand’s view, was chaotic and philosophically vacuous. Rand commented harshly on Wolfe’s neglect of the very elements of fiction that Barbara had already agreed were essential—“plot, theme, characterization, style”—and so overwhelmed the young woman with her logic that Barbara renounced Wolfe on the spot. Years later, in a series of private seminars that were transcribed and collected posthumously in Rand’s The Art of Fiction, the author selected some of Barbara’s favorite passages from Wolfe’s works to illustrate how not to write, asking Barbara to read the passages aloud; Barbara naturally assumed the harsh critique was aimed at her. For Barbara—admiring, self-doubting, and intimidated by Rand’s seemingly unassailable logic—the stifling of her response to Wolfe was remembered as a step in what she thought of as a forced march “into a destructive vise” of repression of real feelings and opinions, as she wrote in 1986. “I was to continue along that path for many years.”

In an era when grooming counted, the Brandens also noticed that Rand was personally untidy. She wore short skirts to showcase her shapely legs, but her stockings were often torn, her skirts were stained, and her hair might be unwashed or uncombed. Frank occasionally snapped at her about such carelessness, Barbara recalled. In this respect, as in others, Rand hadn’t appreciably changed from the quixotic child her mother used to nag.

Most intriguing to them was her marriage. O’Connor, who could have posed for an Esquire ad and who exuded warmth, gentility, and wisdom, was unresponsive to philosophical discussion and even to most books, yet Rand, who usually placed the highest premium on analytical intelligence and self-assertion, called him her “top value.” Seated, she would glance around to be sure he was nearby; she continuously touched him and held his hand. “Frank is my rock,” she told Barbara. To Nathaniel, she said, “He believed in me when no one else did,” and, “We have the same sense of life.” He was silent because he was “too disgusted with people to share what he is with the world,” she told them. In their memoirs, both Brandens would declare that a few years after meeting Rand, the author would confide that her marriage had been in trouble at the time and that she had contemplated divorce; she didn’t divorce Frank primarily because she didn’t want to upset her life while her book remained unfinished. She even confirmed Thaddeus Ashby’s observation that Frank never initiated sex and never had initiated sex in the history of their marriage. In any case, since Barbara and Nathaniel could find no trace of disgust in Frank O’Connor, nor of the energy and conviction that powered Rand’s heroes, they shrugged off their questions and gradually stopped thinking about the nature of this marriage.

In the fall of 1950, Rand began touching Nathaniel, too. She sometimes held his hand as they strolled the grounds and talked about their ideas and her work. Barbara saw nothing odd in the older woman’s affection for Nathaniel. If Nathaniel did, he was not troubled. His feelings bruised by Barbara’s rebuffs, he enjoyed this mild, seemingly safe flirtation. After evenings spent reading Atlas, Rand compared him to the talented, irresistible Francisco, whom she had modeled on swashbuckling heroes such as Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel and on memories of the childhood summer she had spent climbing in the Swiss Alps with a boy. “I could never love anyone but a hero,” she told him more than once. Later, he admitted that he sometimes found these assertions and comparisons confusing. For how, at twenty, was he a hero? How was O’Connor one? At the time, however, Branden basked in her approval. He had been raised by a doting mother and grandmother who had prepared him for life