Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [44]
Some of the stories she was writing were practice drills, imitating what she was reading: Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, Babbitt, and Elmer Gantry, detective stories (“for the plots”), and short stories by her new favorite writer, O. Henry. (She even signed two unpublished stories from that period “O. O. Lyons.”) She was also absorbing the civil-libertarian iconoclasm of H. L. Mencken, Albert J. Nock, Gouverneur Morris, and, perhaps, Saturday Evening Post columnist and novelist Garet Garrett. She read and reread a charming turn-of-the-century novel of engineering prowess and conventional anti-unionism called Calumet “K,” which DeMille gave her as a present and which became her lifelong favorite novel. She was careful to make note of books she didn’t like: Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (“mushy, morbid”) and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (“pointless conversations about the meaning of life”). There was no use in looking for heroes there.
The topics and narrative strategies she chose in these early stories cast long shadows; she would visit them again and again. In “The Husband I Bought” (circa 1926), she dramatized something she would later call “man worship,” which involves a woman’s placing a heroic male lover above everything else in her life. Sometimes, man worship results in a female character’s having to renounce the man she loves in service of an ideal version of her love. In “The Husband I Bought,” for example, a wife leaves a “beautiful, too beautiful” husband so that he may guiltlessly marry another woman with whom he has fallen in love; the wife, now a pariah in her town, prefers to deify the “maddest, wildest” joy of her husband’s early love for her than save her reputation and her humdrum marriage. Interestingly, the story attempts to turn the tables on the old fictional formula of a wife’s self-sacrifice; this wife, far from giving up her own happiness in favor of her husband’s, claims to be preserving what she values most: her memories, her fantasies, her inner world. Written before Rand found O’Connor again, it reads like an exercise in grieving for Lev Bekkerman.
Other stories reveal surprisingly critical views of American life and character. Rand seemed to be encountering the same essential envy, conformity, and mediocrity in Americans that she had seen and loathed in Russians. In unfinished notes for a stunningly harsh and antisocial novella called The Little Street (1928), based on the actual trial of a notorious killer named William Hickman, she took a page from Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis and presented a cast of small-town jurors and spectators who were fat, stupid, and placid: “human herds … who have but one aim: to ruin all individuals and individuality.”
In spite of the novella’s hateful tone, it formulates her great theme: the exceptional individual against the mob of men. Of the protagonist in her story, a murderer, she wrote, “He doesn’t understand, because thankfully he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people. Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should.” (This, by the way, is practically a diagnostic description of narcissism, and also a description of Rand herself.) As to the actual Hickman, whose highly publicized crime had been to strangle and dismember an eight-year-old Los Angeles girl, she spends pages describing his admirable qualities, including his “disdainful countenance,” “his immense, explicit egoism,” and the fact that he is, in her estimation, a “brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy,” although she does not condone his gruesome crime. In a message to herself in her notes, she observed, “A strong man can eventually trample society under his feet. That boy [Hickman] was not strong enough.”
At the time she drafted The Little Street, she had been out of Russia for just two years—too little time to form a reasonable critique of the average American