Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [168]
The months immediately preceding the publication of Atlas Shrugged brought a spell of bright optimism after a long season of emotional and intellectual exhaustion. The hard work of writing the novel was finished; the remaining chapters involved a pleasurable “cashing in,” as Rand put it, of clues and themes already well established. For the first time, she felt secure in having the support of a truly outstanding agent, editor, and publisher, all of whom grasped her ideas, her objectives, and the breadth of her accomplishment. Although she did not delude herself that the cultural elite of the late 1950s—Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson—would embrace her work any more cordially than the elite of the 1940s had, let alone undergo a capitalist conversion on the basis of the novel, she did believe that no attentive reader could misunderstand her message or its kinship to the ideals of America’s Founding Fathers. Her Enlightenment sense of life (though clearly not the facts of history) assured her that ideas based on human reason would always, eventually, triumph over small-minded schemes devised by the irrational and the power hungry, and that ideas rule the world.
She warned both Cerf and her circle of young friends not to expect too much. “I am challenging the cultural tradition of two and a half thousand years,” she explained, with her usual sense of grandeur concerning her work. Cerf knew that the reviews would be mixed, at best. But the others anticipated drumrolls and accolades. Years earlier, Barbara had written to her, “Whether or not the world [deserves; crossed out] to be saved will depend on how they respond to your book.” She still thought so. Peikoff, now twenty-four and half hysterical with admiration for his favorite writer, foresaw a renaissance of political liberty and a restoration of an idealized nineteenth-century-style laissez-faire economy. Alan Greenspan, the oldest in the group at thirty-one and by far its most sophisticated member, couldn’t shake off the conviction that her arguments in Atlas Shrugged were so “radiantly exact” as to compel agreement by all honest men and women. He often said that Ayn Rand put the moral basis under capitalism for him. Until 2008, he never changed his mind.*
As Rand hurried to finish the last three chapters in the early months of 1957, O’Connor was painting. He had taken up painting in 1955, when, as a dare, Joan Blumenthal had offered to teach everyone in the inner circle how to draw and paint. Most who signed up bumbled along, but O’Connor took to painting as he had taken to gardening, avidly and with remarkable focus. Using a corner of the bedroom as his workroom, he sketched and painted constantly and again established a certain degree of independence for himself. After greeting the Collective on Saturday evenings, he would slip away to paint imaginary views of modern towers and tree branches with chiseled leaves. As long as he was nearby, Rand didn’t object to his not appearing by her side; she was proud that he was giving visual expression to what she called his “exalted sense of life.” She marveled at what she regarded as his talent and often said that she saw a striking similarity between his artistic vision and her own. “There were no historical influences at all in his work,” noted Barbara Branden, probably echoing Rand, in 1962. Rand maintained the same about her fiction and philosophy. Yet she decided that he would benefit from professional training and asked Mary Ann Sures, a graduate student in art history, to search for a suitable art school for him, and after the publication of Atlas Shrugged he enrolled in the Art Students League on West Fifty-seventh Street. His teachers, portrait painter Robert Brackman