Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [192]
The NBI reply cards in Atlas Shrugged worked. Requests for information about the lecture series came pouring in from all over the United States and Canada, and even from abroad. Demand reached such a pitch that in 1960 Barbara and Nathaniel launched what he called the NBI tape-transcription service, which distributed reel-to-reel recordings of the New York lectures to remote locations, beginning with Los Angeles and Chicago, then expanding to Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, and elsewhere. In Toronto, Branden’s sister Florence Hirschfeld ran the program from the finished basement of her home. Like other far-flung NBI tape representatives, she gathered friends and, through local newspaper ads featuring Rand’s name and the titles of her books, recruited interested strangers. Participants arrived once a week to sit in straight chairs in front of a large tape player; in Toronto as elsewhere, between thirty and one hundred people showed up to listen, each paying half the New York rate, or thirty-five dollars per course of lectures. The physical tapes and a percentage of the money went back to the New York office, at that time located in the Brandens’ apartment on East Thirty-fifth Street. NBI also published and distributed pamphlets and books, furnished speakers and material to Ayn Rand clubs, gave readings of Rand’s plays around the country, and distributed recordings of the plays. Later, Branden wrote proudly of having aided Rand’s transformation from an undervalued novelist to a systematic philosopher, adding that the repeated appearance of their names in NBI newspaper ads across the country added to her fame while initiating his. For him, and for Barbara, Objectivism became a full-time occupation as well as a personal mission.
In the end, Rand later said, it was the buzz and growing influence of the NBI organization, along with Nathaniel’s attentions and his optimism, that fueled her recovery from depression. As little as she had believed in the value of a formal lecture service, or seen much promise in Branden’s early students, two things about NBI surprised her. First, she noticed that students, even the dull ones, were profiting from her books and Branden’s instruction to become “infinitely more rational” than they had been. Second, she saw that her protégé and his wife were creating an unexpected new avenue by which, she thought, ideas could infiltrate a corrupt culture: from the middle class upward, instead of from the intellectual class down, as in Russia and, indeed, among leftists in the United States. With NBI, she saw her philosophy taking root “in a way I did not know.” The “whole enormous response to Nathan gave me a preview of what can be done with a culture,” she said in 1961. “Seeing [him] start on a shoestring, with the whole intellectual atmosphere against him, standing totally alone and establishing an institution: that was an enormous, crucial, concrete example of what can be done.”
By the spring of 1961, she had emerged from her depression. She began to look outward again and to see issues and causes to which she wanted to apply her knowledge and her gifts. But in some ways she never fully recovered—either her sense of purpose or her control over an unstable emotional life. “I hate bitterness,” she said to Branden, but she remained bitter. “If only I didn’t feel such loathing,” she said. “If only there was someone to respect and admire.” But there was no one, and aside from Cyrus, Victor Hugo, Cyrano de Bergerac, Frank, Branden, Aristotle,