Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [65]
Watkins couldn’t place Anthem in The Saturday Evening Post or in any other magazine, and Macmillan and two other publishers rejected it as a book. (One of Macmillan’s readers, perhaps the ubiquitous Granville Hicks, imprudently observed that the author of Anthem “does not understand socialism,” Rand wryly recalled in the early 1960s.) The novella was published in 1938, when Cassell & Company brought it out in England under the title Ego. Eight years later, in the wake of the immense commercial success of The Fountainhead, she revised it, added a preface, and let a political ally’s small West Coast press publish and distribute it in pamphlet form. A beautifully illustrated magazine version appeared in 1953. And when a paperback edition became available in the 1960s, some high schools made it mandatory reading. To date, a total of three and a half million copies have been sold. Rand loved this story, perhaps more than her later, celebrated work. It was “more precious to me than anything I have ever considered writing,” she revealed in a 1938 letter to Cassell.
Rand was fond of Watkins, whose rescue at a low moment in her career she never forgot. But the agent’s inability to sell Anthem and Ideal disturbed her. Then, in the fall of 1937, she accidentally discovered that the agent had neglected to keep an eye on Macmillan’s postpublication handling of We the Living. She had run out of author’s copies of the book, and when she made a routine request to the publisher for more, she was dumbfounded to find out that the novel was out of print. Macmillan, in violation of its contract, had failed to reprint the book when inventory ran low. Far worse, it had destroyed the type the novel had been set with and couldn’t reprint it. For Rand, this calamity was compounded by the fact that We the Living’s sales had actually been rising in 1937, not falling, as typically happens in the second year after publication. She agreed to meet with a Macmillan editor, James Putnam, who—not especially contrite—offered her a deal: He would arrange to have the type reset and to issue a new edition, at considerable cost, if she would sign a contract with Macmillan for the publication of The Fountainhead. Furious and heartsick as she was, this sounded attractive. She decided to accept the offer on one condition: that along with a $250 advance against royalties, payable now, the publisher would guarantee a $1,200 budget for promotion of the new book. The editor refused. Rand walked away, taking the copyright to We the Living with her. Not until the late 1950s would readers again be able to buy and read her arresting first novel. Her trust in Watkins was wearing thin.
The O’Connors moved again—in fact, they moved twice between autumn 1937 and autumn 1940—and again settled on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. By early 1938, with Nick’s help, Rand was feeling socially at ease enough to throw a party in Town Hall for her aristocratic British friend by mail, Lady Boileau. Boileau was visiting America to promote her new novel, Ballade in G Minor, to give conservative political speeches, and to meet with such luminaries as Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt in Hyde Park and Washington, D.C. J. Edgar Hoover arranged for a special tour of FBI headquarters for her, where, Boileau gaily reported, she shot a Tommy gun. She pronounced the FBI director “charming.” Years later, Rand herself would try, and fail, to see him.
The year 1938 brought rumors of impending war in Europe. It also brought a welcome burst of economic activity after a short but devastating recession in the midst of the lingering Depression. Rand’s own financial condition improved that summer when RKO made an offer of ten thousand dollars to acquire the long-expired MGM film rights to The Night of January 16th. The studio intended to cast Claudette Colbert or, even less plausibly, Lucille Ball as the solemn Karen Andre. The fee would have to be split with the detestable A. H. Woods, but five thousand dollars was better than nothing. This was especially so because Watkins had