Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [72]
Like Dominique, Wynand cares for no one, with the possible exception of Dominique herself. He hates both his own pandering and the mob his newspaper serves. Then, while searching for an architect to design a dream home for himself and his new wife, he meets Howard Roark. Unaware of Roark’s history with Dominique, or that Dominique and Toohey have been using the Banner to discredit the young architect, he hires and befriends Roark. By the time he understands Roark’s immense moral and aesthetic value, however, it is too late to save his paper or himself. Toohey has mobilized popular resentment against Roark, and against Wynand’s patronage of Roark, into an advertising boycott and a strike by the newspaper’s reporters and editors. In a failed effort to preserve his business, Wynand also forfeits what remains of his self-esteem by denouncing the one person he respects, Roark. Rand intended Wynand to be the book’s great tragic figure: a Nietzschean antihero who allows the weakling Toohey to destroy his empire because he misunderstands the nature of power. In fact, his character was partly her critique of Nietzsche’s will to power; although she, like Nietzsche, still held the masses in contempt, she no longer believed in dominating or forcing them. “You were a ruler of men,” Wynand famously tells himself. “You held a leash. A leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends.” Because rulers are dependent on their subjects for their power, they also live at second hand. Wynand “rules the mob only as long as he says what the mob wants him to say,” Rand noted. Roark, on the other hand, needs no power other than his own dynamic drive to create and build. Never does he suggest that the masses are there to serve him, as both Kira and Nietzsche do.
Toohey, whose sole aim is power and is therefore the incarnation of collectivist evil, can destroy the Banner, but his plans to take it over and run it are thwarted by Wynand’s simple last-minute remedy of halting the presses and closing the paper. This was Rand’s trial run of an idea that would become a major element in Atlas Shrugged and in her vision of utopia: the impotence of evil to produce anything or prevail against creators, unless good people cooperate with evil and give it strength.
In her notebooks, she defined The Fountainhead’s theme as “individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but within a man’s soul.” Apart from the heroic theme and the sex, and notwithstanding the seemingly implausible events of the story, what makes the book phenomenally compelling is her remarkable ability to tie her ideas about individualism and the proper use of power to her plot and characters, and then tie her characters to one another. Thus, in her notes, Roark is “the man who can be [an individualist hero] and is [one].” Dominique, who in spite of her combativeness actually yearns for Roark’s eventual triumph, is a priestess and “the woman for a man like Roark.” Wynand is “the man who could have been [a hero] but isn’t.” Cleverly, passive Peter Keating is “the man who never could be [a hero] and doesn’t know it,” while Toohey is “the man who never could be [a hero]—and [does know] it.” Because Toohey is aware of his fundamental lack of generative power and wants to recast the world in his image, he is the embodiment of evil: a collectivist avenger who acts as the Lenin of The Fountainhead.
By the early fall of 1937, Rand had outlined everything but the novel’s climax. She wanted to organize the plot so that Roark would