Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [67]
Familiar to Rand as his character was, not least because it resembled her own, Roark did not provide the first germ of the idea for The Fountainhead. His glossy, callow schoolmate and opposite number, Peter Keating, did. Rand liked to tell the story of how she conceived of Peter Keating, who gave the novel its original title, Second-Hand Lives. In 1931 or 1932, while she was still living on North Gower Street and clerking in the wardrobe department of RKO, she became fascinated by her next-door neighbor, Marcella Bannert, the young woman who had helped her to place Red Pawn at Universal Pictures. Marcella was an executive assistant to David O. Selznick, at that time RKO’s chief of production, and she was ambitious. Every day, the Russian émigré observed the American go-getter, admiring her obvious drive but disliking almost everything else about her, including her choice of a career and the impression she gave of being a Hollywood climber. One day, to pin down the differences between them, she asked the young woman to explain what she wanted to achieve in life. Marcella had a ready answer. If nobody had an automobile, she would not want an automobile. If some people had an automobile and others didn’t, she would want an automobile. If some people had two and others had only one or none, she would want two automobiles, and so on. And she would want people to know that she had more than they did.
The conversation was a revelation to Rand. By her standards, Marcella seemed not to want anything for herself. Rand’s goal was to create a fiction of ideas out of her experience and extraordinary gift for imagining and reasoning. Marcella merely wanted to outstrip the Joneses. The prickly young moral philosopher’s judgments about people were based on whether they shared her values and “sense of life.” Marcella appeared to have no values except those derived from other people; she prized what they prized and wanted more of whatever they had, evidently to fill an emptiness inside. Although some people might have called Marcella selfish because she set her sights on luxury and status, Rand didn’t look at it that way. On reflection, she saw that the young woman was actually “selfless,” in the sense that she had no authentic self with which to desire or create anything that was hers alone. Marcella’s quality of selflessness, or lack of passionately held ideas and values, explained why she and so many other people Rand knew conformed to apparently meaningless conventions. It gave her the key to a problem that had puzzled her since childhood: why people who were so much less intelligent and passionate than she was treated her with such unfriendly indifference or even malice, seemingly because of her gifts. Pondering her conversation with Marcella, she concluded that her resolve to do and think what she wanted, so different from what others seemed to want, challenged the premises of their existence. Not only was she a genius surrounded by mediocrities, as her mother had often reminded her in letters. She also possessed a moral independence and integrity that the others did not. To some degree, she, like her 1934 character Kay Gonda, shamed them merely by living.
Marcella’s admission stirred a broader revelation. It explained the psychological source of what she called “the collectivist motivation,” by which she meant the drive to seek the meaning of one’s life outside oneself. Collectivists hunger for an all-knowing deity, an altruistic purpose, or a dictator to tell them what to do as a fig leaf for their own inadequacy and emptiness; they love what is average and “selfless” and fear what is exceptional, original, and has to be created by the self. Such people live by others’ choices. They exist at second hand. The absence of an authentic selfishness—that is, a desire to live according to one’s own principles, based on the action of