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cousins accumulation, acquisition, and pleasure; no good character in The Fountainhead wants anything material or relational for himself, and even the bad characters’ deepest ambitions are spiritual. Keating wants adulation so that he can have the illusion of a self. Toohey wants to make use of his only gift: manipulation. “Enjoyment is not my destiny,” he tells Keating. “I shall find such satisfaction as my capacity permits. I shall rule.” Much of the novel’s thrilling intensity comes from the dangers posed by Roark’s insistence on spiritual integrity—his unwillingness to compromise any aspect of his vision. Compromise is said to be an insult in Russia; in America—a functioning democracy—it is a way of life. Finally, Roark feels no sexual jealousy, even when his beautiful mistress sleeps with and marries first Peter Keating and then Gail Wynand. In fact, he seems to feel closer to Wynand because he knows what the mogul doesn’t know: that the two men share a knowledge of Dominique’s body. Free love and sexual equality were standard notions in Russian intellectual circles from the middle 1800s onward. They certainly weren’t standard in America in the 1930s and 1940s; and Rand’s hard-breathing fantasies and blithe acceptance of serial sexual affairs were to create as much surprise and buzz among readers of the time as did her hero’s pride in blowing up a housing project.

In later years, when Frank O’Connor took up painting, Rand would say that she envied him his simple pleasure in applying paint to canvas. As she left off outlining and began to write, her work proved slow and grueling. Although she had mastered her story line, finding the proper nuances of style and an emotional vocabulary that fit her theme took more time and energy than she expected. As with We the Living, these matters had to be worked out sentence by sentence, almost word by word, in her adopted language. She wrote and rewrote, cut and restored, bending over her handmade walnut desk every day and deep into the night. For inspiration, she gazed at the publicity photograph of an ethereal young O’Connor she had hung above her desk. The portrait of Frank “makes John Barrymore look like an office boy,” a visitor once remarked. By mid-1939 she had only about a third of the novel in first draft.

She missed her deadline with Knopf. Blanche Knopf gave her an extension of one year, until June 28, 1940. For a number of reasons, she missed that deadline, too, and couldn’t say with certainty when she would finish. By mutual assent, then, her contract with the publisher was canceled. As Watkins once again began to circulate her outline and early chapters, Rand grew alarmed about money. Her theatrical royalties were slowing and her savings were slipping through her fingers. She could look forward to no advance or sales. But her inner world was richer and more luminous than ever, and the moral ideas she and Roark were testing “in man’s soul” would soon also be tested in the political sphere and begin to harden into code.

SIX

THE SOUL OF AN INDIVIDUALIST

1939–1942

Renunciation is not one of my premises. If I see that the good is possible to men, yet it vanishes, I do not take “Such is the trend of the world” as a sufficient explanation. I ask such questions as: Why?—What caused it?

—Introduction to The Romantic Manifesto, 1969

My research material for the psychology of Roark was myself.” In the four and a half years it took her to write The Fountainhead, from late June of 1938 through Christmas of 1942, her psychology was increasingly volatile. All around her, in news about the impending war in Europe and among the top players in political and literary circles, she thought she saw Keatings and Tooheys triumphing in matters of policy and popular opinion. Her own professional setbacks—the collapse of a theatrical venture, renewed difficulty in earning a living as a writer—stung more than ever. The perception that she was being passed up, even undermined, as a result of her courage in speaking out against Communism grew more acute. The period was not all