Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [159]
She had drafted the first line of the speech in the summer of 1953. Having allotted roughly three months to its completion, she was frantic in early 1955, when she had already devoted eighteen months of nonstop effort to it and was not yet finished. She would require an additional eight months before she wrote the final sentence: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” That declaration, repeating the theme of Howard Roark’s courtroom speech and emphasizing the reciprocal nature of individual rights, was important to Rand. The oath is “a dramatized summation of the Objectivist ethics,” she explained in a Playboy interview in 1964, using a term she coined for her system of ideas, and it is the oath taken by each of the strikers on entering Galt’s Gulch. Similarly, Galt tells the millions of people listening to their radios, “Just as there are no contradictions in my values and no conflicts among my desires—so there are no victims and no conflicts of interest among rational men.” Although she was living with others’ silent conflicts, Rand intended no irony. She was removing the teeth from reality’s harsh bite.
For nearly ten years, off and on, she had been promising Alan Collins and Hiram Haydn, who was Archibald Ogden’s replacement at Bobbs-Merrill, that the completed manuscript of the novel was only months away. During the two-plus years she spent constructing John Galt’s speech, she gradually stopped going out into the city she loved. By the start of her affair with Branden, she was seeing few of her distinguished New York friends. She settled into the kind of grueling schedule that had earlier yielded two-thirds of The Fountainhead in twelve months’ time. That year, 1942, had been the happiest of her life. She was not happy in 1954 and 1955, apart from the time she spent with her lover. In place of The Fountainhead’s colorful scenes of adventure and conflict, she was wrestling with the logic of a system of abstractions, laboring to tie together her theories of metaphysics (that reality is objective and cannot be altered by wishes or emotions), epistemology (that knowledge comes through reason and never through feeling), morality (rational self-interest), politics (individual rights), economics (free-market capitalism), and sex (the erotic response to intellectual values). Closing every loophole and presenting the finished doctrine in the form of a dramatic speech by the novel’s leading hero was the most difficult task of her life, she confided to Barbara. It was while working on this famous section of Atlas Shrugged that she began to speak of herself not only as someone with a philosophy of life but also as a philosopher.
With a few exceptions, none of the ideas contained in the speech were new to her. But shaping them felt like “drops-of-water-in-a-desert kind of torture.” She often worked all day, and sometimes all night, dressed in her favorite nightgown: a floor-length, blue-green cotton tunic trimmed with Hollywood-style rhinestones at the neck. At one point, she stayed inside the apartment, working for thirty-three days in a row, seeing no one but her husband, Barbara, and Nathaniel, and, on Saturday nights, members of the Collective. The amphetamines she took helped her to stay awake, but she grew so tired that her body sagged. At times she couldn’t eat, sleep, or even talk. She complained of tension in her neck and shoulders. She nagged at O’Connor, who sometimes snapped at her, and she exhibited unpredictable mood swings with the Brandens. Finishing John Galt’s speech pushed her to the limits of her endurance, Barbara wrote, and shortened the distance between intensity and rage. If she had sometimes been self-absorbed, or incurious about others’ points of view, or