Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [200]
Nathaniel Branden led the way. After the Newsweek profile, he had used his large NBI mailing list to call on all students of Objectivism to write rebuttal letters to the editor and cancel their subscriptions. In response to Hook’s review, he constructed a point-by-point refutation in the contemptuous tone and percussive rhythms of his mentor. Because the finished piece was far too long to appear in print as a letter to the editor, he raised money to run it as a full-page ad in The New York Times Book Review of May 28. In three dense columns, he upbraided Hook for even trying “to state what Miss Rand’s ideas are,” let alone argue against them, and suggested that the highly respected scholar go back to school to study the history of ethics. Rand loved this kind of intellectual combat, especially when she was being aggressively defended by Branden. “It was almost worth Hook’s review,” she told Nathaniel, to watch him go to war on her behalf. And he was proud of his ability to drive enemies from the castle gates.
Branden later said bitterly that since she, too, had come to expect him “to protect her from the world,” his “failure was that I was not in my fifties.” By this he meant that he was not experienced or strong enough for her to lean on without damage to himself. But even as he helped her, he also benefited. In 1962, Bennett Cerf agreed to publish a small book adapted from a series of radio talks Branden had given on the art of Atlas Shrugged, which he called Who Is Ayn Rand? in homage to “Who is John Galt?” in the epic novel. Barbara contributed a biographical essay that revealed, for the first time since the 1930s, that Rand had been born and grew up in prerevolutionary Russia. Not surprisingly, both parts of the book presented the author exactly as she saw herself: as a unique creative force compelled to struggle against a crass, corrupt, unthinking, and indifferent world in order to write and guide her masterpieces into print.
Astonishingly, even this modest volume, so adulatory that the Brandens later disavowed it, sold well, going through several printings and proving that popular interest in Rand was practically unlimited. On a personal note, preparing the book allowed the maestro to spend months working with Branden to fine-tune the texts of his radio scripts for publication, and she grew closer to him, happier, less critical, and more satisfied than she had been in years. It was the first of a number of honeymoon periods that occurred between them. “She could hardly complain that I was neglecting her when her rival was this book,” he later wrote.
If like-mindedness and personal loyalty had always been important to the strong-willed émigré, they positively preoccupied her in the years following her depression. During Saturday-night socials with members of the Collective and their spouses, friends, and younger guests, “enormous enthusiasm was expected for every deed and utterance,” Branden told an audience in 1996. She discouraged the kind of probing or “invalid” questions she had been happy to answer in the early 1950s. “Right and wrong, rational and irrational, moral and immoral—those were the words being used all the time,” recalled Joan Blumenthal. Rand increasingly judged her votaries’ merit on the basis of their “sense of life,” or subconscious attitude toward the grandeur and perfectibility of man, and encouraged them to do the same