• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1670 0

” But Jean-Paul Sartre and his band of “bad guys” had beaten them to it. They briefly considered “contextual absolutism” and “contextualism” but gave them up for lack of sex appeal. They settled on the only slightly spicier name “Objectivism,” which they intended as an homage to the immutability of objective reality and the competence of perception and reason to grasp and understand it. It also conveyed an urgent emphasis on the scientific method, Rand thought; she had become especially concerned with countering the influence of John Dewey and his followers’ subjectivist theories of education. She was probably unaware that such ideas partly derived from Oliver Wendell Holmes’s eloquent responses to the unintended consequences of the abolitionist movement and the Civil War. Yet she knew that it was Dewey who, in the 1950s, “showed us how to live without truth or any theory of reality [and] made us aware that what we think and believe has no foundation anywhere,” as Norman Podhoretz later put it. In many ways still a Russian thinker, she located the origin of this problem in ideas, especially those of Hegel and Kant, rather than in the peculiarities of American and European history.

On the afternoon of March 20, 1957, Joan Blumenthal and Mary Ann Sures were on secretarial duty in the East Thirty-sixth Street apartment. After proofreading a stack of typed pages, Blumenthal timidly knocked on Rand’s study door, then cracked it open to announce that she and Sures were ready for more pages. From inside they heard a raspy growl, “If you come in here, I’ll kill you!” Nonplussed by her tone, they rode the elevator to the street and called Leonard Peikoff from a pay phone, since the apartment’s only phone was in Rand’s study, and asked him what to do; and so Peikoff, too, was on hand when she emerged an hour or so later waving a manuscript page that read, “The End.” “One word leads to another!” she said gaily. She had met her Random House deadline one day in advance. Trailing her into the living room, Frank said, “Congratulations, darling,” and everyone fell to hugging everyone else. Someone phoned the Brandens. Sures ran out to buy pastries at a local bakery. Champagne appeared and coffee flowed. Rand danced like a girl to the turn-of-the-century melodies she called her “tiddlywink” music and led the band with her baton. After thirteen years of work, she had memorialized in words her own music, its intricate orchestration, and her determined march toward its completion. Just as Dagny, listening to the last recorded concerto of Richard Halley, recognizes in the chords “a great cry of rebellion … a ‘No’ flung at some vast process of torture,” so Rand now flung her definitive “no” at the despots and conformists who would try to control or exploit such brilliant, creative minds as hers.

She delivered the book. From his earlier reading of it, Haydn was ambivalent, at best, about its ethics and politics. Although he admired her narrative pace and mastery of plot and was pleased to have been able to attract a best-selling author to his new firm, he had doubts about the novel’s “drab” prose style and core ideas. Pursuing what he thought was his editorial duty, he, too, suggested a number of cuts, including cuts in John Galt’s speech. When Rand refused, he appealed to Bennett Cerf. “You’re some editor!” Cerf barked at him. “I’ll fix it in no time.” The high-spirited founding editor met with the author. “Nobody’s going to read that [speech],” he told her. “You’ve said it all three or four times before. … You’ve got to cut it.” Answering with a comment that became publishing legend, she said, “Would you cut the Bible?” With that, Cerf threw up his hands but cagily asked her to forfeit seven cents in royalties per copy to pay for the additional paper it would take to print the uncut speech and other long passages that put her in excess of the word count in her contract. She agreed. Henceforth, Cerf cheerfully acted as her facilitator and supporter. Haydn resigned himself to being an “apprentice copy editor” who helped her search for and remove