Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [63]
She had spent the spring and early summer poring over architectural texts as background material for The Fountainhead, but now she set aside her books and musings to tackle what soon became a months-long effort to turn We the Living into a stage play for Mayer’s expected 1937 production. At Ann Watkins’s urging, she also rewrote a novella she had completed but not published in Hollywood in 1934 as a play; both agent and author were eager to strike again on Broadway while The Night of January 16th was remembered as a hit. Called Ideal, the novella-turned-play featured a Greta Garbo—like movie star named Kay Gonda who quotes Nietzsche and, with tragic demeanor, seeks one fan from among her millions who will agree to risk his life for what he claims to be his ideal: her. Finding only a lonely drifter named Johnnie Dawes, a less violent version of the murderer-hero of the unpublished 1928 novella The Little Street, Kay Gonda reflects that most of her audience really hates her, because she embodies a commitment to romantic ideals that they are afraid to live by. As she flashes back to the original source of her exalted expectations of life—the sight of a very young man standing on a rock, his slender body like “a string trembling to a note of ecstasy no man had ever heard”—the reader of the play has his first glimpse of Howard Roark. Ideal is about fidelity and unfaithfulness to values, a theme that foreshadows the preoccupations of The Fountainhead. Watkins couldn’t find a producer for it, and although Rand’s Russian-American friend Ivan Lebedeff’s wife, a gifted German-born actress named Wera Engels, tried with Rand’s encouragement to interest European producers in the play, negotiations broke down. While Ideal didn’t find a home, either as a novella or as a stage play, Gonda’s ultimate problem, the conviction that she is morally superior to her audience, is one that both Roark and Rand would soon confront. (As a clue to how much Rand identified with Roark and other male figures in her fiction, in a Freudian slip during this period she referred to Kay Gonda as a “truly heroic man.”) When Jerome Mayer, like A. H. Woods before him, ran into funding problems, the stage adaptation of We the Living was put on hold.
In July 1937, Rand moved with her husband to Connecticut for his second season in summer stock. They settled in shady Stony Creek, on the Long Island Sound, where, she told friends, she was soon doing her best work. While O’Connor rehearsed the role of Guts Regan and parts in other plays (“It will be very good experience for him,” she wrote somewhat condescendingly to a Hollywood friend), she walked on the beach with visitors Albert Mannheimer and Nick Carter and mused on the evolving shape of The Fountainhead. She was within two miles of the town’s famous pink-granite quarries, which she may have visited as research for the all-important quarry scene in which her heroine, Dominique, meets Howard Roark. But plotting the novel was complicated—“I was going crazy” trying to tie the characters together in a climactic scene, she said—so, as a rest, she composed the short, futuristic novel Anthem while propped on a rubber raft in the sand. A mannered but still entrancing story, Anthem envisions a primitive world in which the word “I” has been erased from human memory and replaced by the collective “we.” Characters repeat things to “ourselves” and intone mottos such as “We are nothing. Mankind is all. We exist through, by, and for the State.” After the hero, a subversively inquisitive figure called Equality 7–2521, falls in love with Liberty 5–3000 in an act of individual choice that is punishable by death, he finds himself investigating other secrets, including