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Fifty years after Rand had quieted the ache she felt following the critical reception of Atlas Shrugged, an interviewer asked Branden whether she would have been satisfied by recognition from a group of literary and philosophical equals, as she had said she would. “I’m inclined to think, in the end, no,” he answered, reflecting. “It is inconceivable to me that I would have said this twenty or thirty years ago—I wouldn’t have said it—but to me, looking back, I think she felt too sorry for herself in certain ways.” After a silence, he added, “I find myself thinking about certain actors and actresses who have received just about every award it’s possible to receive from the entertainment industry and who remain self-doubting and feel underappreciated. And you wonder what it would take to make them feel adequately appreciated.” In this, too, Rand predicted her own future in the character of Kay Gonda, in Ideal.

Perhaps now not even Branden could make her feel fully “visible.” But she turned to him, certain that he could.

FOURTEEN

ACCOUNT OVERDRAWN

1962–1967

It does not matter that only a few in each generation will grasp and

achieve the full reality of man’s proper stature—and that the rest will

betray it…. The rest are no concern of mine; it is not me or The

Fountainhead that they will betray: it is their own souls.

—Introduction to the twenty-fifth-

anniversary edition of The Fountainhead, 1968

As her vigor returned, so did her fighting spirit. She went back on the college lecture circuit and took the Brandens with her. Speaking in opposition to most of the political and ethical ideas of the day, she became a symbol of contrarian idealism and defiance to student audiences across the country.

In February 1960, she was invited to give the annual lecture in the Yale Law School’s prestigious Challenge series. In a car on the way to New Haven, she scribbled the final details of a slightly expanded version of “Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World,” her speech for the evening. She was nervous. By chance, the New Haven Symphony Orchestra was performing elsewhere on campus, and the Yale Bulldogs hockey team was playing a home game. Since she thought of Yale as a breeding ground for liberals, she was afraid she would be speaking to an empty auditorium. To her surprise, and Yale’s, the flyer tacked to the law-school bulletin board attracted the largest audience in the history of the Yale series; the overflow was so great that the school placed loudspeakers in the building entryway and on two upper floors. During the question-and-answer period, one member of the audience shouted from the balcony, “Under your system, who will take care of the janitors?” She sang out, “Young man: the janitors!” and the hall erupted in laughter. She spoke to the students in the same encouraging tone she had taken with Nathaniel and Barbara in 1950. “Don’t give up too easily,” she told them. “Don’t sell out your life. If you make an effort to inquire on your own, you will find that it is not necessary to give up and [that] the allegedly powerful monster[s] of collectivism and convention will run like rat[s] at the first sign of a human step.” She was several times interrupted by applause and each time smiled shyly and raised her hand to wave. Time summarized her thesis but left out some of her most provocative statements (“Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences …The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving [a beggar] a dime,” she declaimed) and omitted a revealing anecdote about a fracas that broke out between Barbara Branden and a law-school student. At a ceremonial dinner before the lecture, the student, a member of the reception committee, had asked Barbara if she represented “a photographic ideal” of Atlas Shrugged, presumably implying that her slender figure and bearing were a purposeful evocation of Dagny Taggart. After the lecture, when the student