Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [185]
Once one is acquainted with Ayn Rand and her work, the measure of one’s virtue is intrinsically tied to the position that one takes regarding her and her work.
No one who does not admire what Ayn Rand admires and condemn what Ayn Rand condemns can be a good Objectivist. No one who disagrees with Ayn Rand on any fundamental issue can be a fully consistent individualist.
Because Ayn Rand has designated Nathaniel Branden as her “intellectual heir” and has repeatedly proclaimed him to be an ideal exponent of her philosophy, he is to be accorded only marginally less reverence than Ayn Rand herself.
It is best not to say most of these things explicitly (excepting, perhaps, the first two items). One must always maintain that one arrives at one’s beliefs solely by reason.
To Rand’s credit, it must be remembered that she never actively sought this kind of reverence, at least outside the circle of her original loyalists, and, at first, was not overly impressed with the students who flocked to NBI. Most struck her as well meaning, perhaps, but lacking in intellectual depth and quickness. “The lectures attracted a lot of not particularly intellectual people, such as dentists and engineers,” recalled Joan Kennedy Taylor. “They loved her vision of a technologically advancing, logical world. But this was the first time many of them had dealt with ideas. They thought that Ayn Rand had invented laissez-faire capitalism.” After the Rothbard incident, “I saw her change,” Taylor added. “In the beginning she was genuinely collecting data and trying to figure out what people’s motives were. She came to the point where she had gathered enough evidence and thought she knew what certain attitudes or questions meant.” Having made a judgment, she “wouldn’t look closely [at individuals] again.” During the first years of NBI, Rand said, “I thought that my fans disappointed and depressed me worse than my enemies.”
By the fall of 1958, she was drifting into a clinical depression. At first, no one noticed the intensity of her moods. Sales of Atlas were going strong. Fan letters arrived by the hundreds every week. Largely due to the Brandens’ efforts, her growing reputation as an abstract thinker and a charismatic speaker was attracting new readers and generating lecture invitations from all over the United States. She was relatively rich. She had a beautiful, kind husband and a bright young lover. And yet she was profoundly unhappy. She began to speak to her friends of the bitter revulsion she felt for the culture. To Frank and the Brandens, she said she could not understand why she and her masterpiece had been vilified, belittled, and willfully misconstrued to mean the opposite of what she had written. She cursed the literary Tooheys and Keatings who she believed were trying to destroy her book. Where were the “raves that raved about the right things”? Where were the men of ability, whom she had always championed? Why didn’t the nation’s scientists and businessmen stand up for her? Why wasn’t there at least one intellectual giant who had the courage publicly to declare the meaning and revolutionary value of her work, as the young people around her did?
Filled with despair and in dread of appearing less than fully in control, she began to refuse social invitations and to stay in her apartment. Again, she complained of physical tension. Gradually, the Brandens realized that her condition went well beyond postpublication letdown. During their visits and on the phone, she lamented and raged against the mediocrity, cynicism, timidity, and malice she saw rewarded everywhere, and, as the months wore on, she wept almost daily out of frustration and grief.
With minor reprieves, she remained depressed from late 1958 until early 1961. She stopped giving lectures on college campuses; she no longer enjoyed the intellectual give-and-take. “I cannot fight lice,” she said to Branden. In physical pain from stress, tired to the bone, she spent hours playing solitaire at her