Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [206]
By its title alone, The Virtue of Selfishness summarized a lifetime of original thinking on the subject of “what I want.” It included five essays by Nathaniel Branden as well as fourteen essays and speeches by Rand, of varying degrees of insight and common sense. She had formed the habit of quoting John Galt as an independent authority who proved her points, and she opened and closed her most important essay, “The Objectivist Ethics,” which was based on her Wisconsin speech, with his words. In half a dozen other pieces she set out to establish such self-consistent but eccentric ideas as that “there are no conflicts of interest among rational men,” a notion that could have meaning only inside the moral world of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
Ironically, The Virtue of Selfishness did not include “The Fascist New Frontier.” On November, 22, 1963, five weeks after her climactic meeting with Bennett Cerf, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Her critique of his administration was instantly obsolete. A few days after the assassination, as the entire nation grappled with its shock and grief, Cerf wrote to her, imploringly, “I hope you will agree with me that the appalling events of the last week make all our previous discussions academic.” She didn’t agree. “She said the assassination had nothing to do with what she had to say,” Cerf recalled. “It didn’t change her opinion one iota.” Yet he, too, often thought of her fondly. “I think you are one of the most wonderful people I have ever met in my life,” he wrote to her in 1965, “and this decision of yours [not to publish any future books with Random House] will not change my feeling in that respect in the least degree.” She also wished him well, assuring him that she would always give him credit for publishing Atlas Shrugged.
Cerf blamed her followers for having flattered her into greater dogmatism and obstinacy than was natural to her. But she abandoned old acquaintances when they crossed her not just because she was buffered by her devotees, although their adulation surely made this easier to do. A friend of John Hospers’s, trying to console him after their falling-out, explained it this way: “Well John,” the friend said, “you were a scholar. She was a revolutionary.”
An old friend of hers put it another way: “She could be immensely empathetic if she saw things in you that were like her. But if she didn’t see herself in some aspect of you, she didn’t empathize at all. You weren’t real to her.”
It was at about this time that Rand began to hint to Branden that she wanted to resume their sexual affair.
She was fifty-eight. He was thirty-three. They were joined together in overlapping business and creative ventures. They collaborated on the monthly newsletter, pamphlets, promotional presentations, lecture tours, and speeches. In an expansion of NBI, Branden started a small publishing venture to reissue Rand’s favorite books, including Merwin and Webster’s turn-of-the-century novel Calumet “K” and Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs, and established a book service to sell these and other books that might interest Rand’s readers. He launched a bicoastal NBI film series called “The Romantic Screen,” sponsored NBI dances and formal-dress balls, and created NBI Art Reproductions to sell mailorder copies of Frank O’Connor’s and Joan Blumenthal’s paintings, as well as a soft-focus portrait of Rand by Ilona Royce-Smithkin, one of O’Connor’s mentors at the Art Students League. (“This is exactly how I feel about myself,” Rand said on seeing the Joan Fontaine-esque portrait for the first time.) At least twice a year, Rand delivered NBI lectures to jam-packed audiences on the aesthetics of romantic writing and on Objectivist epistemology, and she not only answered student questions at the lectern every week but also tape-recorded answers