Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [281]
as supple as a cat: AR often described FO this way.
Like Zarathustra, he welcomes difficulties: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 25–27.
“walk over corpses”: TF, p. 89.
“a soul that has reverence for itself”: December 26, 1935 (JOAR, p. 88). AR is quoting Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. The passage reads: “What is noble? What does the word ‘noble’ still mean to us today? How do noble people reveal who they are, how can they be recognized under this heavy, overcast sky of incipient mob rule that makes everything leaden and opaque? There are no actions that prove who they are, actions are always ambiguous, always unfathomable; and there are no ‘works’ either. Among artists and scholars these days, you will find plenty of people whose work reveals them to be driven by a deep desire for nobility. But this very need for nobility is fundamentally different from the needs of the noble soul itself, and almost serves as an eloquent and dangerous testimony to the absence of such needs. It is not works, it is faith that is decisive here, faith that establishes rank order (this old, religious formula now acquires a new and deeper meaning): some fundamental certainty that a noble soul has about itself, something that cannot be looked for, cannot be found, and perhaps cannot be lost either. The noble soul has reverence for itself. “(Judith Norman trans. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], p. 172.) From her earliest notes, AR used this passage as an inscription to TF, but just before publication in 1943, she removed it. By then, she disapproved of Nietzsche’s discussion of faith.
archetype of the creator: BBTBI.
the first germ of the idea: BBTBI.
In 1931 or 1932: The dates are based on the fact that Selznick came to RKO in 1931 and that AR left RKO in 1932 (AR, p. 50; TPOAR, p. 132; BBTBI).
fascinated by her next-door neighbor, Marcella Bannert: BBTBI.
helped her to place Red Pawn at Universal Pictures: “Ayn Rand’s Family and Friends.”
If some people had an automobile: BBTBI.
would want people to know: In 1996, when Scott McConnell of ARI found and interviewed Marcella Bannert (by then married and named Rabwin), the woman had no recollection of this exchange with AR. As for her attitude toward AR in the 1930s, she was as unimpressed with AR as AR was contemptuous of her. Bannert said, “She [AR] was rough. She was masculine. … She was the worst-dressed woman I have ever known in my life. She had a terrible figure in the first place. She went around with no makeup on” (100 Voices, Marcella [Bannert] Rabwin, pp. 42–43).
a genius surrounded by mediocrities: “Ayn Rand in Russia.”
“the collectivist motivation”: BBTBI.
they love what is average: February 22, 1937 (JOAR, p. 107).
“He was great”: TF, p. 188.
a seeming change of personality in her sister: AR remembered NR as an independent, nonconforming child, with tastes and attitudes like her own; NR remembered herself as Ayn’s “shadow and yes-man.” AR’s evidently mistaken perception of her favorite sister as a soul mate rather than a follower foreshadows her relationship with her young acolyte and lover, NB, in the 1950s (quote from NR comes from 100 Voices, p. 13).
seemed to live to make others jealous: The letter was written in 1933 (“Ayn Rand in Russia”). This was not an entirely new development in NR; sixteen when AR left Russia, NR had been known to imitate her successful older sister’s handwriting and prose style and to hoard the letters and stories AR sent home.
Roark chuckles: TF, p. 634.
based on Louis Sullivan: The mentoring relationship between Cameron and Roark resembles the early apprenticeship of FLW with Louis Sullivan, as described in Wright’s autobiography. Frank Lloyd Wright. An Autobiography (London: