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By Root 1773 0

the eyes was lower than the other in the painting. He brushed her hand away and muttered, “Leave me alone.” “It was the only time I ever saw him lose his temper,” said another artist who happened to be present. Rand apologized profusely, but she didn’t change her behavior. “Smoke used to come out of my ears,” recalled Joan Blumenthal, who over the years became convinced that Rand’s interference in her husband’s artwork was partly motivated by fear. “You’ve heard about the issue of a ‘malevolent universe premise’?” she asked. “That was Rand’s term for not really believing that happiness is possible on earth. That’s what she was concerned about: that some sadness or malevolence would show.” She had reason to worry. In a 1961 portrait O’Connor painted of her (a strong likeness that demonstrates his ability to communicate in paint), the huge eyes are not only slightly out of alignment with each other but also radiate different messages: anger, sexuality, and power on the left and wariness and sorrow on the right. It’s a striking image. Although she forbade him to sell his paintings while he lived—she said she could not bear to part with them—she was discovered throwing this one in a trash bin after his death in 1979. None of her inner circle had ever seen it.

At first, Rand’s hints to Branden about resuming their affair were muted. “I’m coming back to life,” she told him, adding, “Can you imagine what these past years would have been like if you did not exist?” or, “You saved my life.” Her grateful remarks rattled Branden; he thought they hinted at continued dependency and a new set of expectations. She often asked whether he still loved her, and at one point she stammered, “Do you think …?” He understood her meaning and answered yes—yes, they would go back to being lovers. He later wrote, “It was the only answer [I could give] that would not have precipitated an immediate crisis, the end point of which would have been the annihilation of our relationship.” This statement of Branden’s has been a subject of disagreement among Rand’s surviving disciples; those who later turned against him claimed that he wasn’t worried about excommunication as much as about being demoted from his glamorous and gainful role at The Objectivist and NBI. Those who took his side pointed out that he had dedicated himself to her and her ideas from his freshman year in college, was intensely protective of her self-image, and was naturally frightened of her volcanic temper and allegiance to a black-and-white moral universe. In any case, he later admitted that he didn’t love her, not in the romantic sense she meant, and hadn’t since before the publication of Atlas Shrugged. If she appeared to forget her original horror of being “an old woman pursuing a younger man” and was maneuvering to get what she wanted, he was procrastinating. He also told her something that was true: that she was the most important person in the world to him. He said he needed time to work out the problems in his ten-year marriage to Barbara before resuming a romantic relationship with her. During that early conversation she replied, sighing, “I don’t feel fully ready yet, either. I was just testing your attitude for the future.” She offered to counsel the unhappy couple. He accepted. For the moment, he was off the hook.

He knew, if she didn’t, that it was far too late to begin again. During the years of her depression, he had behaved toward her as a good son behaves to an ailing mother, except that they occasionally slept together. Yet he had also distanced himself from her. He had discovered an interest in hypnosis, a therapeutic technique that she categorically rejected. In this respect and others, he resented what he later characterized as her narrow-mindedness, intellectual rigidity, and “appalling moralism.” Yet he largely hid his resentment from her and continued to moralize prodigiously himself. In The Objectivist Newsletter, he stressed that holding any idea that contradicted any other was to “kill one’s capacity to be certain of anything.” In the department of rendering