Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [187]
Whatever the catalyst, she was unable to fend off or end the pain and confusion her depression brought. She played solitaire because she couldn’t write. Except for a few pages of handwritten notes for the prospective novel To Lorne Dieterling, she wrote little. She no longer knew for whom she was writing, or why, she told the Brandens. She was paralyzed by disgust and contempt. And yet not writing was a torture. “Thinking is all I do,” she said.
She and Nathaniel continued to say they loved each other, but she called a halt to sex. In Atlas Shrugged, she had written that “no form of claim” between lovers should ever be “motivated by pain and aimed at pity.” Relief from pain, not sex, was what she needed most and sought from him, and self-pity was one of her prevailing moods. The suspension of sex wasn’t the end of the affair, she assured him; they would be able to renew their intimacy with each other as soon as she came back to life. In the meantime, she wanted him to remain her suitor in every other way. In the following two years, she alternately complimented him on his grasp of her psychology and railed against his lack of expressed romantic and emotional interest in her. When they did sleep together, about a dozen times, their encounters were stiffer, more ritualized, and less enjoyable for Branden.
He did his best to bring her hope based on the steadily expanding popular influence of Atlas Shrugged and the rapid growth of NBI. But he was not sorry for the interval of sexual inactivity. The attraction to Rand had faded further under the weight of her sadness, anger, demands, and increasing neglect of her physical appearance. She was never fastidious, but at about this time her grooming slipped so precipitously that Branden asked Barbara to speak to Rand about bathing more regularly. In any case, he did not want “the burden of a ‘romance’ for which I no longer had genuine enthusiasm,” he wrote. “I needed all of my resources to continue functioning” as the leader of a movement and the caretaker of its faltering fountainhead.
Thus, as the Eisenhower years ended and John F. Kennedy inaugurated an era of unparalleled American prosperity, new cultural freedoms, increased spending on social programs, and the beginnings of a distant, controversial war, Nathaniel and, to a lesser degree, Barbara established a smaller, safer sphere for their benefactor to inhabit. The proud sufferer asked her two friends not to discuss her depression with the others, so most of her followers knew little or nothing about the extremity of her moods. But they understood that she, and they, were almost universally derided as hate-mongering greed-is-good neo-Fascists and social Darwinists, when they knew themselves to be visionaries of freedom and progress. Some lost friends. Some, like Leonard Peikoff, experienced their parents’ disapproval or estrangement. “How is it possible that we can be accused of advocating, politically, the exact opposite of what we stand for?” they said among themselves after lectures and on Saturday nights. They concluded that, like Roark, they were being punished for their virtues and that the outside world hated and feared them for trumpeting the moral good. (In sectarian parlance, the “social metaphysicians” hated “the good for being the good.”) In their foreshortened frame of reference, they now incessantly compared the state of the culture to themes from Rand’s novels. As time went on and Rand and they continued to be ridiculed, they saw themselves as reflections of her heroes and attributed her villains’ evil motives to her adversaries. “It was more and more true that we were living inside the world of Atlas Shrugged,” said Branden.
All the while, her fame increased.