Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [169]
Months earlier, Rand had honored her lover by naming him her “intellectual heir,” the mark of distinction she had earlier conferred on Albert Mannheimer, although Branden didn’t know that. On one of their intimate evenings together in the fall of 1956, over dinner at the Russian Tea Room, she confided that she would also like to dedicate Atlas Shrugged to him, along with her husband. The dedication page would read, “To Frank O’Connor and Nathaniel Branden,” the two indispensable men in her life. Again she cautioned him that aligning himself publicly with her might bring him trouble. He didn’t care, he answered proudly. “The idea of the greatest literary masterpiece I’ve ever read being dedicated to me is almost more than I can hold in my brain,” he told her. It didn’t occur to him until later that such a monumental gesture by Rand might bind him more permanently in his romance with her or otherwise limit his freedom. As they rose to leave the restaurant, she murmured, “Do you ever wonder what people think when they look at us?” He answered gaily that they probably mistook her for his daughter and told her that he loved her.
In her author’s note at the end of Atlas Shrugged, she explained the double dedication. O’Connor, she wrote, embodied the “values of character I wanted to find in a man. I met such a man, and we have been married for twenty-eight years.” While writing The Fountainhead, however, she had kept in mind an ideal reader: someone with “as rational and independent a mind as I could conceive of.” She had found that reader in a nineteen-year-old fan named Nathaniel Branden, she wrote, adding grandly, “He is my intellectual heir.” Then and later, she did not seem to notice the apparent irony of an “intellectual heir” of independent mind.
Rand once called the futuristic novella Anthem “my manifesto, my profession of faith, the essence of my entire philosophy.” It was the hero of Anthem who gave meaning to the honorific, first in the case of Mannheimer and then in the case of Branden. As she explained her thinking to Barbara, the Collective as a whole reflected “what I had once told Nathan about himself—that I was regarding [him] as Equality 7–2521 in Anthem,” meaning as the progenitor of a new and better world. When she asked herself, “Of what importance is posterity to me?” she answered, “‘It’s not posterity [I care about] but the exceptional man, or my kind of man, in the future.’ Nathan is that man in the next generation.” Thus, as she saw it, the fate of her lover and disciple had already been chronicled in the fantasy world of Anthem. In some measure, then, and in some recess of her mind, she preferred to leave the corrupted world she lived in lightless, as in both Anthem and Atlas Shrugged, and thus prepared to receive her torchbearer and message.
If The Fountainhead had released an outpouring of excitement, hope, and yearning among hundreds of thousands of readers, Rand and Branden were aware that Atlas Shrugged might well set off an avalanche. As Hiram Haydn noted, the book had best-seller stamped all over it.
They decided they needed a name for her system of ideas other than Randianism, which had occasionally cropped up. They discussed what word would best describe it. She liked “existentialism,” Branden said in 2004, because it echoed Aristotle’s maxim that “existence exists.