Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [70]
Dominique has to be one of the most contrary characters in twentieth-century fiction. Her love for Roark ignites both her sexuality and her malice. Before she sees him again, he is called back to Manhattan to design an important building. At summer’s end, she, too, returns to the city, and after a week or two she finds out who he is. She discovers that she loves his buildings and, as a result, sets out to deprive him of commissions and destroy his reputation through her popular newspaper column. She does this not from anger, jealousy, wounded pride, or even rebelliousness; her motive is a contorted form of hero worship that drives her to protect what she loves from the desensitized gaze and dirty hands of the world. Rand once said that Dominique is “myself in a bad mood.” Like Rand as a child, the heroine wants what she values to be hers alone; others aren’t worthy even to admire it. Like Kay Gonda, she lives in a permanent state of gloom over the lack of heroic standards in the ordinary world. She tries to sabotage the hero’s work in part to save him and his beautiful prospective buildings from contamination by the “soot-stained” mob. To add to her contrariness, her belligerence and sexuality are tied together: on nights when her column has been particularly damaging to his ambitions, she goes to his room and lets him sleep with her. They both find ecstasy in their struggle with each other. But even this ecstasy is unacceptable to Dominique. On the night she tells Roark that she loves him, she also announces that she has married Peter Keating. “When I think what you are,” she says to Roark, “I can’t accept any reality except a world of your kind.” She adds, “They’ll destroy you, but I won’t be there to see it happen. I will have destroyed myself first.”
The mob emits a kind of muffled roar in The Fountainhead. The novel opens in 1922 and ends in 1940, but most of the action takes place during the Red Decade of the 1930s. The New York Banner, a mass-market newspaper that publishes Dominique’s column, specializes in maudlin stories about the hardships and religious piety of slum dwellers, single mothers, subnormal children, and the poor. On that note appears the novel’s fourth major character, Ellsworth M. Toohey, the Banner’s spindly, power-hungry architecture critic and a collectivist malefactor; he has a concave chest, lacquered hair, and a Hitler mustache. He is almost Dickensian in his malicious genius for undercutting his superiors’ achievements and for striking becoming poses on behalf of the downtrodden. His purpose is to undermine the social importance of integrity and originality, in order both to conceal his own lack of creativity and to flatter the lumpen mass of men and women who are the Banner’s readers. He and Dominique join forces, albeit with different motives, to bring down the now slowly up-and-coming “Mr. Superman,” Howard Roark.
By the spring of 1937, Rand had outlined most of the book, along with a number of subplots she would later cut. In order to provide authentic details of the characters and settings, she now needed a thorough introduction to architecture. She turned for help to the legendary reference librarians at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. They supplied her with stacks of expertly vetted materials on architectural history and theory. Looking for clues to the design philosophy of Cameron and Roark, she began by studying the masters of early skyscraper design and of clean, fluid modernist styling. This led her directly to Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. In fact, one of the first books she read was Wright’s 1932 masterpiece of American iconoclasm, An Autobiography. She later said that she had barely heard of Wright before encountering the book, but she couldn’t have chosen a more suitable self-made creator, or a more useful model for Roark, without reviving Thomas Edison. As she fine-tuned her hero’s professional experience and mission, she borrowed Wright’s organic architectural