Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [173]
There were a few public declarations of support from old-line conservative acquaintances. In Isabel Paterson’s former newspaper, The New York Herald Tribune, John Chamberlain praised the book as a “vibrant and powerful novel of ideas” that, in breadth of ambition and intellectual intensity, rivaled Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Rand’s friend the economist Ruth Alexander, writing for William Randolph Hearst’s New York Daily Mirror, went so far as to assert that “Ayn Rand is destined to rank in history as the outstanding novelist and most profound philosopher of the twentieth century.” Some out-of-town newspapers praised her writing style, the novel’s clever plot and action, and her ability to unite ideas and suspense. But these tributes were largely lost amid the flood of invective, and in any case they didn’t console or satisfy the author or her circle.
Privately, old friends sent letters of appreciation. After making many pages of notes about the novel, particularly about its insistent atheism, which he didn’t share, electric company executive William Mullendore wrote, “I am now able to say it: It is a great book,” although he added, “I do believe in the spiritual life.” Ludwig von Mises was more forceful in his praise. “Atlas Shrugged is not merely a novel,” he wrote. “It is also—or may I say: first of all—a cogent analysis of the evils that plague our society. … You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you [the masses] are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.” He told his students, “No one writes about the bureaucrats the way Ayn Rand does.” As private affirmations, these remarks were welcome, but they did nothing to counteract the public scourge. And they didn’t praise her as a writer. She still wanted “superlatives or nothing” and “raves that raved about the right things.” She would not receive them until decades later.
Bennett Cerf suffered mild apoplexy. After investing hundreds of thousands of dollars, “we thought that we were going to be hooked,” he said in 1971. The worst was yet to come. At Christmastime, William F. Buckley’s National Review ran a savage critique of Atlas Shrugged that has become a model of a successful intellectual ambush. Called “Big Sister Is Watching You,” it was the work of Whittaker Chambers, the very reformed Communist spy whom Haydn had mentioned as evidence that Random House was politically evenhanded. Like Buckley, the exceptionally intelligent if eccentric and oracular Chambers was now a devout Christian, a Quaker, and he didn’t merely disparage the novel, he set out to destroy it, partly in an attempt to discredit her defense of godless capitalism. “Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term,” he huffed. “I find it a remarkably silly book. It is certainly a bumptious one.” Its heroes and villains, he wrote, derived not from Aristotle but from Nietzsche and Karl Marx. “Just as her operatic businessmen are, in fact, Nietzschean supermen, so her ulcerous leftists are Nietzsche’s ‘last men,’ both deformed in a way [that would] sicken the fastidious recluse of Sils Maria,” a reference to the summer house where Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra. As to Marx, Chambers wrote, “He, too, admired naked self-interest.” More reasonably, he argued that the problem with Rand’s godless vision of earthly happiness as man’s highest moral purpose