Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [162]
On Saturday nights, Rand and her protégé often sat slightly apart from the rest of the group, at the dining-room table or on a couch, while Barbara, Joan and Allan, Leonard Peikoff, Alan Greenspan, and Mary Ann Sures devoured the latest aphoristic developments in John Galt’s code of life. The novel was giving them undreamed-of intellectual stimulation, role models to test themselves against, and, with Rand’s progress on the speech, a road map for living. Some recalled these evenings with Rand as a high point of their lives. “In a world that was hurtling toward collectivism and darkness, we were listening to the ideas of a woman who was a strong, bright light that pointed the way toward freedom,” said one. “I often felt, greeting her, as though I were entering Atlantis, where the human ideal is not merely an elusive projection but is real, alive, here—seated across the room on blue-green pillows,” wrote another. “She wanted us to discuss [her writing], which we did, and those discussions were one of the most exhilarating, exciting, wonderful times of my life,” recalled Nathaniel’s sister Elayne.
As the manuscript pages piled up, some of the women, including Mary Ann Sures, volunteered to work as part-time secretaries. Using Rand’s ancient manual typewriter, “like an old tank,” on the dining table in the O’Connors’ foyer, Sures typed and retyped sections of the novel. The foyer was about ten paces from the study; sometimes, Sures recalled, when she and another helper were reading freshly typed pages to each other as a proofreading technique, they were aware of the author standing half hidden behind the study door, listening for narrative pace and rhythm. Unlike Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin, she was scrupulous about paying her assistants for their work. Sures recalled that she gave them the going wage, down to the quarter hour. As had also been true in California, however, she and Frank sometimes forgot to pay other bills. Some months, sending in the rent check slipped their minds and they received an eviction notice from the landlord. One afternoon, recalled Sures, a man from Consolidated Edison showed up at the door to turn off the electricity after three overdue notices had gone unpaid. It was Frank’s responsibility to handle bills, Rand told Sures, but she didn’t seem upset about it. The lights stayed on, and she greeted him with “darling”s and “Cubbyhole”s when he came home.
Meanwhile, The Fountainhead was far from forgotten. Every few weeks, packets of fan letters arrived from Bobbs-Merrill. Sorting through them, Rand scribbled notes, typically on the order of “very good—to be answered” or “swine—to be damned to the eternal fires of hell.” Some of the most irritating or interesting of these letters she showed to the Brandens, who, when they spotted an especially intelligent correspondent who lived within commuting distance of New York, might ask him or her to a gathering of the Collective. After a few introductory meetings, one such newcomer, Kathleen Nickerson, was told to write to Rand explaining why she was attracted to the novelist’s philosophy. The letter passed muster, and Nickerson began to attend group events. Thus the novelist’s base of active followers gradually expanded. As newcomers demonstrated allegiance to the principles of Rand’s philosophy, they took their places in a concentric circle outside of the original Collective. In this way, a junior Collective grew up. Except at odd times and at parties, new followers typically didn’t see much of the philosopher herself. While she remained bent over the manuscript of Galt’s speech, Branden took over as surrogate, mediator, and “spiritual bodyguard,” as they half-humorously called him. He created his own hierarchy, one that would prove helpful in managing the crowds of enthusiasts who he rightly predicted would flock to her after the publication of