• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1803 0

The poor quality of movies in general and of the roles he was being offered in particular “killed his ambition to work as an actor,” she said, and gave him “enormous contempt” for the whole movie business. But it’s hard to imagine this mild, adaptable man expressing enormous contempt for anything, and he himself seems never to have openly articulated a negative view of the movies. He was reserved in his opinions and modest in his aspirations. With her magnificent way of marshaling arguments, she no doubt found it easy to persuade him to move. “His downfall was his enormous respect for her,” said his niece Mimi many years later, “just as [his father] Dennis respected [his mother] Mary Agnes: a cut above.” Besides, his beloved brother Nick Carter was already in New York, working off and on as a reporter.

Preparations for the Broadway production would begin immediately, A. H. Woods told her; she had to depart for New York quickly. Within days, she and O’Connor packed up their belongings, including her new typewriter and her handmade desk, piled some of them into their car and had others shipped, and bade their friends good-bye. They were going off to live in “the greatest monument to the potency of man’s mind” in human history. It was another dream come true.

Before the dream lost any of its sweetness, she mailed a copy of The Night of January 16th to her family in St. Petersburg. Nora, proud and possessive of her older sister’s glamour and success, locked up the play and wouldn’t let anyone see it. Anna pried it loose and translated it into Russian so that Zinovy and the non-English-speaking members of their extended family could read it. Afterward, her father wrote to her that he was in awe of her achievement. He compared the beauty and economy of her language, even in translation, to that of Shakespeare. Nora sent a sketch of a theater marquee with the name “Ayn Rand” emblazoned in lights. Anna rhapsodized about the radiance, human suffering, and hope that the play projected and commemorated MGM’s purchase of the play by writing, “Hollywood with its caprices at last used common sense and is forced to admit that white is white”—a fascinating forward echo of Rand’s later philosophical rallying cry that “A is A.” But she also conveyed a warning. On the basis of her daughter’s previous letters, she foresaw that the young writer would soon be surrounded by jealous competitors and gatekeepers who would resent her intelligence, originality, and drive. It didn’t matter whether or not the play was a success in New York, Anna wrote. What mattered was to retain her belief in her talent. Weak people give up easily and lower their heads in defeat, she admonished, but “the strong who grow strong in battle grow ten times as strong.” What everyone was proudest of were Rand’s optimism, her iron will, and her determined belief in her abilities.

Clearly, Anna had been won over to the side of her daughter the writer—but not without foreseeing struggle or giving a small competitive jab suggestive of troubles to come.

FOUR

WE ARE NOT LIKE OUR BROTHERS

1934–1938

Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagrees…. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone.

—The Fountainhead, 1943

Ayn Rand and Frank O’Connor left Los Angeles in their secondhand Nash on November 24, 1934. The actor drove the drafty old convertible across the southern half of the country, replacing worn brake linings and a dying battery along the way, until on a back road in Virginia the car hit a pothole in the rain, rolled over, and refused to budge.

The car was towed to the nearest town. The travelers, unhurt, followed behind, taking in the landscape of the as-yet-undeveloped rural South. At one point, they glimpsed an antebellum plantation house on a broad lawn, with a convict gang working on the road outside. With an instinct for Gothic drama, Rand committed the sight to memory. It gave her the idea for Dominique Francon’s Connecticut country