Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [68]
And so Peter Keating was born, with the soul of a second-hander. Vain, affable, dependent on his popularity for self-respect, and without specific talent, he enters the book in a mild state of adolescent self-inflation and ends in a frightening and irreversible moral decay. Unlike his college housemate Roark, he graduates from the Stanton Institute at the top of his class, amid a sea of envious admirers, yet he has no gift for architecture. He leans on Roark for help with his most difficult assignments and cheerfully stabs competitors in the back. He hates Roark’s asceticism, talent, and purpose, as well as the fact that Roark knows that Keating is a fraud. Rand describes him this way: “He was great; great as the number of people who told him so. He was right; right as the number of people who believed it. He looked at the faces, at the eyes; he saw himself born in them.” As she began to outline The Fountainhead, Keating became the emblem of all that Roark is not.
There was another probable source for the character of Keating, however, one that Rand may not herself have been aware of. A year or so after talking with Marcella, she received a letter from her mother describing a seeming change of personality in her sister Nora. Nora had won a prize at school for being the most socially active teacher, the letter said, and the young woman was positively jubilant about it. Anna chafed at this, fretting that Nora had grown far too concerned with what other people thought of her; she seemed to live to make others jealous, Anna wrote. That Nora may not have changed as much as Anna and Rand imagined didn’t occur to either of them, since until then it had been Rand whose preferences Nora had mimicked and admiration she had wanted. It isn’t known how Rand answered, but she surely identified one influence that she may have believed was at work on her favorite sister, for she hadn’t forgotten Anna’s social climbing in the years before the revolution or her constant nagging to be nice to other people. (Late in The Fountainhead, for example, Roark chuckles at people who attend a lecture only in order to tell their friends that they heard a famous person speak, echoing Rand’s memories of her mother.) Thus she had an old, embittering, and ready model on which to fit her new insights into second-hand lives.
Once in New York, the penniless Roark goes to work for the great Henry Cameron, a grizzled genius and an alcoholic outcast whose character is based on Louis Sullivan. Cameron is the only living architect from whom Roark is sure that he can learn the fine points of his trade; the old man is famous for having built the first skyscrapers that looked like skyscrapers and not like Gothic castles curling into the clouds. Keating, too, heads for New York, but he joins the high-society architectural firm of Francon & Heyer. Through mild (at first) duplicity, imitation, and flattery, Keating quickly rises in the firm. Meanwhile, Roark and the out-of-favor Cameron sit day after day, without paid commissions, in a dim studio in lower Manhattan. Eventually, Cameron dies, and Roark survives in poverty on a few small commissions his admirers send his way. He is beginning to develop a reputation.
One day Keating comes to ask a favor. Will Roark help him enter a global competition to design and build the new Cosmo-Slotnick movie studio headquarters in midtown Manhattan, just as he used to help him with thorny school assignments? Keating is desperate: Unless he can win the contest, he fears public humiliation and the loss of a prospective partnership in Francon & Heyer. Out of enthusiasm for a chance to design a tall building, Roark agrees and overnight devises an elegant and innovative plan for a skyscraper. Yet even with Roark’s blueprint in hand, the talentless Keating can’t quite believe he’ll win. So one afternoon he pays a visit to the firm’s ill, elderly partner, Lucius Heyer, and tries to blackmail the old man into