• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1573 0

Ivan Lebedeff, a White Russian actor—at one time, an officer in the czar’s army—who had played in the production version of The Angel of Broadway, helped Rand to get a full-time clerical job in the women’s wardrobe department of the newly formed RKO Radio Pictures, where she worked for the next three years and eventually became the department boss. She started at a salary of twenty dollars a week and earned rapid raises to forty-five. Now or a little later, she began to send money to her parents, apparently telegraphing or mailing it to a semiprivate St. Petersburg store, where Anna and Zinovy used it to buy food and other necessities. This was dangerous, as the Soviet government was desperate for foreign currency and habitually arrested and extorted anyone who had access to money from abroad.

In October 1929, the stock-market crash shook the nation out of its high spirits and into what would become the longest economic depression in U.S. history. Rand’s permanent job was not only a stabilizing force in her marriage but also a precious commodity at a time when hundreds of thousands of Americans were losing their jobs. “I loathed [that job] and hated it,” she said in 1961, but “it was a godsend.” As a new wife, she also tried to keep house—“to cook, and wash dishes, and such”—at night, but she soon gave up and let Frank organize the household. He decorated their new apartment—the first sign she had seen of his ability as an artist, she said. She devoted what little spare time she had to writing. “I came to America to write, and I [have] not forgotten that. That’s something I’ll never give up,” she wrote to her mother’s cousin Sarah Lipton. With worries about her immigration status and money largely behind her, she began to compose another original movie scenario, a theatrical play, and a novel, each of which would help to put her on the map—at last.

The film scenario, called Red Pawn, gathered many of Rand’s current themes, preoccupations, and literary strategies and set them down on a remote prison island off the Siberian coast in the early 1920s. The story begins with the arrival by boat of a slender, beautiful, haughty American woman called Joan, who is secretly the wife of the prison’s most defiant inmate, a Russian engineer arrested for displaying too much “ability” while managing a Soviet factory. Joan, hoping to free her husband, has come in response to an advertisement placed by the stern Bolshevik prison warden, Commandant Kareyev, who is seeking a mistress to relieve his loneliness and boredom. Joan immerses herself in the job of seducing Commandant Kareyev and dazzling him with her Western clothes and values; he, in turn, falls passionately in love with her and with the brand-new idea she gives him that every person, including himself, has “a right to the joy of living.” When he discovers Joan’s identity as the inmate’s wife, the author stages a psychological coup de grâce in which neither the proud Communist nor the imprisoned rebel husband can be sure of whom Joan loves—until she betrays one of them in the story’s final moments.

There are a few notable things about Red Pawn. The prison, built on the site of a former monastery, provides Rand with her first opportunity to compare mystical Russian Orthodox Christianity with muscle-bound Communism and point out the similarities. One of these, an implicitly repugnant assumption that people have a duty to sacrifice their own interests and ambitions to those of others—others often inferior to themselves—forms the story’s core idea: that no religion or ideology may legitimately deprive a man of his absolute right to exist for his own sake, to have “what I want.” Also, in a letter explaining the finished scenario to a producer, she summarized her new method of “building a story in tiers,” starting with a plot that’s gripping enough to carry both the characters and a deeper philosophic meaning; in this way, she explained, an audience can choose to ignore the philosophic content and still enjoy the story. (That audiences and critics would actually do this—ignore her