Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [215]
One additional source of distraction for Branden was a brand-new venture he was then recruiting investors to finance: NBI Theater, Inc., a small corporation to be devoted to the production of romantic drama. “Patrecia’s involvement in acting had reawakened my early love of the theater,” he later wrote, “and I wanted to produce a series of plays and write for the theater myself.” Since an effective way to begin was to appeal to Ayn Rand’s audience, the first project was to be a dramatization of The Fountainhead, adapted by Barbara and approved by Ayn. The Brandens expected it to open in a community-based theater in the Jan Hus Church on East Seventy-fourth Street in the fall of 1968. Casting lay ahead, but at one point Branden considered Patrecia to play the part of Dominique. (Strangely but aptly, Patrecia had recently taken the stage name Patrecia Wynand.) Rand gradually cooled to the project. The involvement of Patrecia would not have increased her enthusiasm.
The lies and conflicts were piling up. By 1967, carefully guarded secrets, rampant gossip, and paranoia were the order of the day. And still Rand hoped for her lover to return.
FIFTEEN
EITHER/OR (THE BREAK)
1967–1968
Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent.
—The Romantic Manifesto, 1969
In early 1967, Rand completed a book-length essay called Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Never among her popular works, it laid out her theories of how man thinks and acquires knowledge and contains what some admirers regard as her seminal contribution to Western philosophy, a theory of concept formation.* Aside from this, and a fiery, farsighted speech against the Vietnam War in April 1967 at the Ford Hall Forum, and a few short essays for The Objectivist, her mental life was now almost entirely focused on what and how Nathaniel Branden thought. Marital counseling having ended, she assumed the temporary role of his personal psychotherapist, even though she had no training in psychology and had little appreciation for therapy’s methods and objectives. More or less adhering to traditional ethical practice, she placed their active relationship on hold “in every sense or aspect” while she probed his psyche. Yet the subtext of their verbal dueling was always their relationship. Over the next several months, they met hundreds of times at all hours of the day and night. In most of the sessions, he took to playing a gloomy child who mutters, “I don’t know,” while she alternated between obsessed scientist and spurned lover. He rationalized, improvised, planted clues, and followed up by denying their significance; she moralized, intimidated, and threatened even as she drilled for answers. She was determined to find out what had happened to her virile young lover “with the sovereign mind of a genius” and the moral courage to love Ayn Rand. In spite of the Brandens’ withholding of important facts—and her own naïveté or purposeful blindness—the thinker gradually pieced together some of Branden’s motives.
She began by analyzing apparent contradictions between his proclaimed values and his behavior. For example, he often said she was important to him. Yet he knew “years ago,” she wrote in her journal, that his apparent inability to be emotionally intimate with her or to discuss their romantic relationship had hurt her. The hours of marriage counseling she had devoted to him and Barbara, along with months of analyzing his problems, had made her feel depersonalized and invisible, she both told him and wrote. And yet even after the breakup of his marriage he had taken no corrective