Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [175]
Years later, in The Passion of Ayn Rand, Barbara astutely observed that the foes of Atlas Shrugged often confused its author’s increasingly authoritarian personality and narrative voice with her philosophy of radical individualism, thus discarding a fascinating baby with the bathwater. “To hear a woman whose main political idea was [that there should be] no first use of force called a fascist—it seemed impossible,” recalled Barbara. But Rand’s certainty that she alone understood the truth and that people who lived by other convictions, especially liberals, religious adherents, and public intellectuals, were mystics of spirit, savages, looting thugs, beggars, parasites, gibberers, carrion eaters, cavemen, and headhunters did have the ring of Big Sister, even if the ideological content of the novel did not. “Her personal bitterness was at odds with her philosophy,” Barbara told an interviewer in 1992. Rand’s language, never pitch-perfect, was abusive and becoming more so.
Bennett Cerf’s concern that the novel would be a financial calamity proved baseless. It prospered with ordinary readers almost from the start. Within six weeks it had sold almost seventy thousand copies. Jostling for attention amid a weird assortment of old-fashioned and forward-looking best-sellers, including James Gould Cozzens’s By Love Possessed, Pearl Buck’s Letter from Peking, Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, Grace Metalious’s taboo-breaking Peyton Place, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, it quickly ascended to number five on The New York Times best-seller list. The belligerent reviews slowed its rise to fame, but it recovered and remained a best-seller for seven months. Five years after its first printing, it had sold more than a million copies. Decade after decade, readers retained their appetite for it. Fifty years after publication, without advertising or the benefit of appearing on most college reading lists, it was still being sold at an astonishing rate of 150,000 copies a year. In a 1991 poll, sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club, readers selected it as the book that had most influenced their lives, after the Bible. In a separate 1998 poll by Modern Library, in which readers chose the best one hundred novels of the twentieth century, it and The Fountainhead took first and second place, with Anthem and We the Living following in seventh and eighth place on the list. In other words, readers found all four of her novels among the top eight in a century filled with brilliant work. (Interestingly, in a corresponding list of critics’ literary choices, Rand’s novels are entirely absent.) Bennett Cerf had been dead for twenty years by 1991, but had he lived he might have laughed merrily to learn that, after all, in one respect at least, Atlas Shrugged was like the Bible.
Again, fan letters arrived by the thousands, from readers whom Rand’s friend Joan Kennedy Taylor characterized as the intelligent common man and whom journalist Claudia Pierpont described as “the largely abandoned class of thinking non-intellectuals.” The letters of thanks and appreciation would continue until her death. The novelist grew wealthy. She achieved fame commensurate with her teenaged dreams. And, for good and ill, she fulfilled the mission she had lived for: to create her ideal man and a microcosmic ideal world in which he and all other “real people” could breathe freely and love passionately—and love most passionately those whose strengths and values most resembled her conception of her own. Nevertheless, the critical backlash in which the novel thrashed and almost sank darkened her outlook and shriveled her spirit, and she had no additional goal to ignite her drive and occupy her mind.
She did her best not to succumb. A month after the appearance of the Chambers review, she began making notes for a new novel, which she called To Lorne Dieterling and described as a story of unrequited