Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [82]
When Willkie lost the election in November, Rand experienced “violent” indignation. At first she blamed Willkie. She and her new associates perceived him as having knuckled under to Roosevelt’s liberalism and backpedaled his way to defeat. No doubt they had overestimated his commitment to a program of free-market conservatism. In her disillusionment, she berated him. “Willkie was the guiltiest man of any for destroying America, more guilty than Roosevelt, who was only a creature of his time,” she said, with a contrariness that would mark her developing public style.
Coming as it did on top of other serious setbacks, the Willkie loss proved a subtle turning point in her life. In the previous four years, after many early signs of success, her disappointments had mounted. She and Watkins had not succeeded in finding a producer for Ideal or an American publisher for Anthem. We the Living was out of print. The Unconquered, her first novel’s unsightly stepsister, had gone from hoped-for moneymaker to critical fiasco and professional embarrassment. Her advanceless book contract had been canceled. All the while her subliminal awareness of her own, if not her husband’s, slight restlessness in marriage was increasing. The years 1940 and 1941 ushered in a permanently more severe, less open Rand. The adherent of reason acquired a habit of turning weak or irresolute allies into enemies and doing so unflinchingly, with Russian flair.
For the time being, however, she thought of her fellow former Willkie supporters as men and women of strong convictions. She and others formed the Associated Ex—Willkie Workers Against Willkie and wrote broadsides and letters to the editor ridiculing the luckless utilities executive and accusing him of aiding the U.S. Communist Party agenda. What the country needed now, before it was too late, she told Channing Pollock, was an organization of conservative intellectuals to frame and promote a full-fledged ideology, or moral justification, of laissez-faire capitalism—to do what Willkie had refused to do. She asked Pollock to be its leader. He agreed. The first few meetings were held in offices around town or in the O’Connors’ most recent apartment, tucked into a slightly scruffy building on East Forty-ninth Street and First Avenue, near where the United Nations headquarters later rose. She and her husband had moved there from the Upper East Side during the campaign, to save money, and the following fall they would move again, this time to a sunless ground-floor apartment on East Thirty-fifth Street near Lexington Avenue. They were down to less than nine hundred dollars of her savings.
It was within this framework that Ayn Rand met Isabel Paterson, the brainy, quirkily Christian fifty-four-year-old novelist and libertarian chief book-review columnist for the New York Herald Tribune. Or, rather, how she remet Paterson, for as soon as the columnist’s name was mentioned as a potential member of the group, Rand remembered having been introduced to her at a literary cocktail party in the spring of 1936, shortly after the publication of We the Living. According to Paterson’s biographer, Stephen Cox, the older woman didn’t remember the encounter, although soon after it took place she mentioned Rand in her column. Through a publicity handout, she had learned that the émigré author had survived the Russian Revolution and had come away believing that suffering was anything but noble and had no redeeming value. Paterson casually but firmly disagreed. She thought that hardships could be instructive, especially for writers.
Cox describes Paterson as the literary world’s most outspoken critic of Roosevelt’s policies. Her column of literary and political commentary was widely read, and she was politically well connected. (For example, her boss, the Herald Tribunes stylish books editor Irita Van Doren, was Wendell Willkie’s longtime