Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [61]
The Rosenbaums’ prospects would have been precarious in any case. For the next few months, telegrams flew back and forth between Leningrad and New York. In the end, the official Soviet answer was no. “Cannot get permission,” read the Rosenbaums’ final telegram in May 1937. Whether the result would have been different had Rand kept out of the public spotlight is debatable, but her timing didn’t help. Shortly afterward, the U.S. government warned that communicating in any manner with acquaintances in the Soviet Union could endanger their lives. The letters between Rand and the Rosenbaums ceased, and all was silence.
Rand wasn’t interested in luxuries; her focus was on producing and earning, not on spending. But she began to use her royalty income for goals she had long deferred. One of these was to move out of the tiny furnished room she and O’Connor had shared for more than a year. They left Sixty-sixth Street and rented a larger room at 129 East Sixty-first Street and then moved into a sunny seventeenth-floor apartment in a handsome Art Deco residential hotel at Park Avenue and Thirty-eighth Street, where the newspaper photograph was taken. With more space to fill, they bought a set of blond Art Deco bedroom furniture and a sleek modern sofa. She shopped for needed clothes—unfortunately tending toward faddish or frilly outfits—and began to wear the sculptural black cape that became her trademark in the 1940s. That was all; the rest of the money would be saved and applied to future projects.
Her greatest objective was to gain time to work on her new novel. She had been musing about its theme since her late teens and had made her first extensive notes about it in December 1935. It would tell the story of a roughhewn American architectural genius named Howard Roark and his quest to create a new kind of architecture. At its heart would stand a great American skyscraper, a symbol of America, of human achievement, and of life on earth. In We the Living, she had focused on young people and on events she had actually lived through because she knew she wasn’t yet ready to create a world; now she was ready. Her first novel had been a practice drill, a preparation for this one. By the summer of 1936, she said, she had earned the right to put her affirmative vision of what it meant to be an individualist—i.e., a champion of the sovereign, self-determining individual—down on paper. She began to construct an outline of characters and events that she thought were intrinsically important. The novel’s working title was Second-Hand Lives, but it would become famous as The Fountainhead.
As she pondered the egoistic, single-minded, hot-blooded character of Howard Roark, whom she was consciously molding into her ideal man, the first notes of marital discord between her and O’Connor sounded. He was far from sexually dominant, or even highly sexed. He had limited ability to discuss ideas with her. By all accounts—and there were many people who knew and loved him—he was sweet, gallant, stoic, funny, emotionally inexpressive, easily led, and profoundly passive. Professionally, he had found little to occupy him in New York and was dependent on Ayn. Although he auditioned for parts in plays, the only roles he is known to have been offered were parts in his wife’s productions and related dramas. He took odd jobs but quit them, apparently at her behest; selling shoes, for example, which he did for a few weeks in 1943, didn’t fit her romantic image of him. He decorated their apartments inexpensively and, according to visitors, imaginatively and beautifully. As teenagers, he and