Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [58]
Three days later, she signed a contract with Macmillan. We the Living was set to run to an immense six hundred printed pages, but the publisher did not ask for cutting or any other alterations, the author happily reported to Gouverneur Morris. She left unsaid what she soon learned: that there had been a heated battle about whether to publish the book at all. As she recounted the story in the early 1960s, a Macmillan editor and poet named Stanley Young had championed the book on literary grounds; Granville Hicks, a well-known critic who read manuscripts for Macmillan, opposed it, taking issue with Rand’s dark portrait of Soviet Russia. Hicks had recently joined the U.S. Communist Party and, in that fall of 1935, was completing his own book for Macmillan, an admiring biography of the American Communist John Reed. Twenty-two years later, to Rand’s horror, Hicks would also be assigned to review Atlas Shrugged for the influential New York Times Book Review and would like it less, if possible, than We the Living.
Luckily, Hicks lost the argument, and Macmillan published We the Living on April 7, 1936. Rand, immensely proud, mailed copies to her Chicago relatives, her Hollywood acquaintances, and a few friends. Cecil B. DeMille received a copy. So did Sarah Lipton, dedicated “with profound gratitude for saving me from the kind of hell described in this book.” She inscribed a copy to Ivan Lebedeff, her “Dear Old Man,” thanking him for his help and for his faith in her, and to O’Connor’s father, Dennis, whom she had not met but addressed as “my American father.”
For a first novel, We the Living received an impressive amount of attention, especially since novels by Rebecca West, Daphne du Maurier, Sinclair Lewis, and, in translation, Charles Baudelaire appeared in the same week, and the impending release by Macmillan of another first novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, was already creating a whirlwind of anticipation. In late April, Rand told a New York Times reporter that she was proud (“as well she might be,” the reporter noted) of the fact that her first film script, her first stage play, and her first novel had all found immediate buyers. This is important to note, because later she would brood over and often exaggerate the difficulties she encountered in finding sponsors for her books and plays and the injustices she met with at the hands of prejudiced or malevolent editors and others. Her followers would believe and repeat these tales of hostility and neglect as though they were true talismans of Rand’s secret, superior world.
Indeed, the reviews were mixed, as they were bound to be in a culture deeply divided about its capitalist past and future. Yet many reviewers demonstrated remarkable perception. Conservative periodicals, those that looked back longingly to the freewheeling culture of the mid-1920s, found much to admire. The book section of the New York Herald Tribune hailed the novel’s “wild cry for the right[s] of the individual” and its “subdued fire and intensity.” The neutral Washington Post remarked on Rand’s beautiful writing and provocative love scenes, which “would cause Boccaccio … to writhe with jealousy.” Rand told one interviewer that she was pleased to have been told that she wrote like a man and to have her work compared with that of Joseph Conrad; she volunteered the additional information that she detested the “inherent sentimentality” that permeated women’s writing. The major jibes came from the practitioners of the 1930s radical vogue. The liberal New York Times marveled at the Russian émigré’s command of English and her narrative power but dismissed her theme as “slavishly warped to the dictates of propaganda”—whose propaganda it didn’t say. The Marxist-friendly Nation mocked the author’s infelicities of style to show that she was “out to puncture a bubble—with a bludgeon.” Though both the Times and the Nation might have known that Soviet Communism was not a bubble, especially in 1936, when its henchmen were systematically slaughtering hundreds