Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [146]
On their very first evening in the apartment, Nathaniel and Barbara came to call, and the familiar mingling of texts and subtexts resumed. The young couple tore through the latest chapter of the novel. While O’Connor unpacked and puttered, the other three launched into a spirited discussion of John Galt, whose chief trait is that, like Roark, he lives without marked emotional conflicts. But Roark experienced pain; Galt does not. In general, this aspect of the writer’s view of heroes had remained the same since The Little Street in 1928, when she wrote that “other people do not exist [for the protagonist] and he does not understand why they should.” In the new chapter, “Atlantis,” an absence of emotion is one of the qualities Dagny prizes in John Galt’s face and manner as he gives her a tour of the beautiful and bustling valley called Galt’s Gulch.
Branden found this quality in Galt unsettling. On that first evening, he asked whether the hero might be too cold or too abstract to be compelling to readers. Rand answered succinctly, “One does not approach a god too closely,” a remark which Branden never forgot. The subject wasn’t raised again. But over the years many readers have rightly complained that the character of Galt is featureless and wooden and is thus the least compelling in the book.
Rand was diplomatic enough not to mention Nathaniel’s concerns about Barbara, and she wasn’t aware that Barbara felt anxious about her relationship with Branden. As it happened, the insecure boyfriend had been responding to Barbara’s summer flirtation by pointing out what was wrong with her and finding deep psychological flaws in her defenses. He had persuaded her to write a letter to their mentor explaining that she was a “mystic,” and instead of laughing out loud Rand had written back to tell Barbara that she must keep working with Branden to fix her errors. This was the state of affairs when, a few weeks after the O’Connors had settled in, Barbara raised the subject of their troubled romance. There ensued a mild version of a style of inquiry that would come to characterize the author’s response to followers from the middle 1950s on.
Frank was out on the evening Rand and Barbara set aside to talk about Barbara’s relationship with Nathaniel. Oddly, Branden was present, too, sitting in an armchair on the opposite side of the living room, letting his mind drift, he later wrote, while Barbara and Rand murmured to each other. When Rand inquired about a second boy whom Barbara had told Branden she liked but hadn’t slept with during the summer in Winnipeg, Barbara responded vaguely and let the subject lapse. A few minutes later, Rand asked again, her tone clipped and purposeful. This brought Branden to attention across the room. When Barbara admitted that, yes, she had had a brief affair with the young man, Branden experienced a “pain that … was excruciating.” Rand’s manner grew gentle, he recalled, as she probed Barbara’s motives and offered reassurance. “Given the moral ruthlessness that was more typical of Ayn,” he wrote in his memoir, Judgment Day, “this was unusual.” “Everything is going to be all right,” she told Barbara soothingly. “We’re going to solve this, once and for all.”
Barbara remembered Rand’s manner differently, as probing and harsh, especially considering that she was not married to Nathaniel and had no obligation to be faithful to him. She felt humiliated. Yet, as the apparently guilty party, she decided she couldn’t ask the man who had by now become her “moral mentor” and, “worst of all,” her psychological counselor to