Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [224]
Except that it wasn’t. Even in the depths of her rage, Branden was far too important to her to let go of him without a final fight. And while they talked, another thought struck her and put her in a panic. If he had been underhanded enough to deceive her about his feelings toward her for months or years on end, what else might he be capable of? Would he do something terrible to embarrass her in public or discredit her ideas—this traitor whom she had publicly called her intellectual heir and to whom she had dedicated Atlas Shrugged? “I can’t predict what he’ll do, and I’m terrified of what may happen to my name and reputation!” she cried in despair. Growing tired and tearful as the night wore on, she murmured, “My life is over. He took away this earth.”
Finally, she began to speak of giving him one last chance. She set conditions: He must do nothing other than prepare his lectures, work on his book, and write for the magazine, activities necessary to earn a living. She ordered him to cancel the planned theater production of The Fountainhead and to severely curtail his social life. He must strive to apply Objectivist principles to himself, and he must work with Allan Blumenthal to correct his disordered thinking. To ensure that he would not do anything to damage her reputation, she demanded that he continue to meet with her for help with his psychology. As for the “pretentious, presumptuous” Patrecia (“actually, she is the girl next door,” Rand had jotted in her notebook, deploying a favorite insult), she had to be ejected from Branden’s social circle; for the sake of Ayn, his therapy with Blumenthal, and Objectivism, he must not see her anymore.
“Appalled by Ayn’s terms,” Barbara wrote in 1986, Branden nevertheless agreed to all of them. Rand expressed hope that he would “regain his mind.” But if he didn’t, she would ruin him—presumably before he could ruin her. Their personal friendship was at an end, but if he could prove to her that he was worthy to represent her philosophy before the world, she would consider letting him remain at the helm of The Objectivist and would not withdraw her endorsement from NBI, without which it could not survive.
Over the next few weeks, she continued to meet with him, though less frequently. They conducted business, talked about his psychological condition, and, once, reviewed a chapter of his book on self-esteem. (“NB’s mind worked excellently on the editing of the book’s chapter,” she noted afterward.) She gave Barbara the assignment of keeping him mentally on track. All the while, she was making more than one hundred pages of shrewd, if painfully myopic, journal entries about what had gone wrong between them. She did not for a minute accept that her age was the real source of the problem. “I do believe that [his] ‘paper’ represents something that he is trying to make himself believe,” she wrote on the day after their confrontation, when she had read the remainder of his letter. Still under the misimpression that he was sexually “frozen,” she added, “Thus he can claim that there is nothing seriously wrong in him. “At times, her notes expressed an austere affection for the bright young man she had met and mentored; at other times, she struggled with overwhelming revulsion against his “filthy soul.” Most often, she displayed remarkable control as she analyzed him from every point of view consistent with her characters and philosophical convictions. At times, she wept in grief. Not once, however, did she ask herself what responsibility she might bear for the harrowing end of one of the two most important alliances of her life. Nor did she attempt to inhabit Branden’s point of view—that, say, of a young man entranced and half-consciously seduced by a charismatic, authoritarian mother figure from whom he lacked the courage to break free. Such empathy for the other was outside her range.
Basically, what she found wrong with him was something she had struggled not to believe: that he had an advanced case of social metaphysics, the wound that disfigured the souls of Peter Keating,