Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [225]
Rand argued with herself about whether he had ever loved her. She concluded that he probably had loved her at first, “at least to the extent to which any love is possible to a man in his psychological predicament.” She was sure of one thing, however, “with the full power, logic, clarity and context of my mind.” She was too much for Nathaniel Branden—as, indeed, she had been too much for nearly everyone except, perhaps, her father, all her life. The result, she recorded with shocking insight, was that Branden’s sexual desire for her “began to grow dim in about a year.” Since she was also the mirror and arbiter of the heroic soul he desperately wanted to possess, he couldn’t admit this, even to himself, without risking his self-image as “a real Objectivist hero and creative genius.” At one time, she wrote, he did have the potential of becoming a hero and a genius, and if he had chosen to pursue Roark’s values of independence and integrity she would not have been too much for him, she reflected from inside her world of fantasy. “But I am too much for the role-playing imitation of that hero, which he chose to become instead,” she wrote. She didn’t pause to consider that her gaudy flattery of a near-adolescent boy had inflated both his vanity and fear, as well as his stake in the enterprise of being a Randian hero—and had also kept him by her side.
She identified two turning points. The first was the publication of Atlas Shrugged, whose brutal reception had destroyed his hopes for both his own and her intellectual “visibility,” she thought. That’s when he had become, like Lorne Dieterling, a man of action for action’s sake—although her notes for the novel about Dieterling were made long before she consciously ascribed this trait to Branden. From 1957 or 1958 on, “our relationship became a quiet nightmare,” she wrote, with Branden retreating into his disappearing-professor act and her sense of herself as a woman receding out of reach. The second turning point came six or seven years later, during a period she called the “Patrecia-break,” meaning, perhaps, Branden’s introduction of Patrecia into her social life and her ensuing anger. It was during this period that she became aware of his “wheeling-dealing,” which she considered a cheap way of avoiding his problems, and “his peculiar, very subtle or intangible pleasure in giving orders to people,” which she called his “big-shot premise, for want of a better name.” She described this as “a combination of faint shadings of an autocrat and a show-off,” proving she was more observant than those around her gave her credit for. Under the general rubric of role-playing, she wrote that he had probably been “role-playing the part of philosopher-psychologist and [in] the relationship with me” almost from the start.
Inexplicably, she didn’t question his claim that he felt only friendship for Patrecia, whose “notary public” soul she imagined offered him relief from the burden of Roark’s stern example. Yet she also angrily described him as a man who had forsaken his highest values because of “a sexual urge for the bodies of chorus girls!” For his own sexual “physicality” was surely one meaning of his paper on “physical alienation” and age, she wrote.
In fact, Branden was letting her discover the truth in stages. In mid-July, after the close of a marathon