Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [6]
In We the Living, Rand’s autobiographical first novel, written when she was in her twenties, the heroine, Kira Argounova, views her mother as an unprincipled conformist. Rand’s childhood clashes with Anna were often focused on her refusal to play with other children and her solitary, even antisocial nature. But Anna seems to have had a cruel streak, too. She told her eldest daughter that she had never wanted children, that she looked after them only from a sense of duty, and pointed out how much she sacrificed for them. Once, she got angry and broke the leg of a doll that Rand was fond of. When Rand was five or so, she recalled, her mother came into the children’s playroom and found the floor littered with toys. She announced to Rand and Rand’s two-and-a-half-year-old sister, Natasha, that they would have to choose some of their toys to put away and some to keep and play with now; in a year, she told them, they could trade the toys they had kept for those they had put away. Natasha held on to the toys she liked best, but Rand, imagining the pleasure she would get from having her favorite toys returned to her later, handed over her best-loved playthings, including a painted mechanical wind-up chicken she could describe vividly fifty years later. When the time came to make the swap and Rand asked for her toys back, her mother looked amused, Rand recalled. Anna explained that she had given everything to an orphanage, on the premise that if her daughters had really wanted their toys they wouldn’t have relinquished them in the first place. This may have been Rand’s first encounter with injustice masquerading as what she would later acidly call “altruism.” Her understanding of how power can be acquired by a pretense of loving kindness would grow only more acute with time.
Perhaps it’s little wonder, then, that from the age of four or five onward, Rand developed a keen sense that anything she liked had to be hers, not her mother’s, the family’s, or society’s, an attitude that readers of her 1943 novel The Fountainhead will recognize in the perverse and complicated character of Dominique Francon. As a corollary, she claimed not to care about being approved of or accepted by her family and peers. Since she generally wasn’t accepted, the proud, intelligent child appears to have learned early to make a virtue of necessity. In her twenties and thirties, she would construct a universe of moral principles built largely on the scaffolding of some of these defensive childhood virtues.
One of the things Rand claimed fiercely as her own was a certain kind of turn-of-the-century music heard in popular theaters and park bandstands, music that included light Viennese waltzes, Western military marches, and “The Drinking Song” from Verdi’s La Traviata. She remembered pleading with her grandmother Kaplan to play this music on the grandmother’s brand-new Victrola, one of the first in St. Petersburg, Rand later said. Her mother and aunts disapproved of her musical taste, but this made the music all the more alluring. She would pick out songs at first hearing and immediately decide, That’s mine, or That’s not mine. For the rest of her life, in moments