Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [88]
Although she and Pollock continued to try to stitch together a conservative advocacy organization, meetings tapered off and the recruiting slowed. To her astonishment, many potential members reacted to her manifesto as if it were written in an unfamiliar language. Her placid definitions of individualism (a political philosophy that holds each man to be “an independent entity” who cannot be deprived of his rights for any reason) and of collectivism (the subjugation of the individual to a group) proved surprisingly controversial. She began to see that Willkie wasn’t the only cloudy thinker on the Right. While she wasn’t ready to dismiss all self-styled conservatives as hopeless traitors, the way she later did, the right-leaning, post-Willkie journalists and businessmen she was meeting struck her as anti-intellectual and smug. She faced the prospect of educating them before they could educate the public. The thought was wearying. She lost interest.
Ever after, she remembered the 1940 campaign and its aftermath as harsh, exhausting, and gloomy—her own real-life descent into the granite quarry to hack out a livelihood from stone.
It was also a frightening moment in world history. In September 1941, the Nazis, having invaded Russia, launched a nine-hundred-day bombardment and blockade of Leningrad (as St. Petersburg was then called), in which as many as a million people died of gunshot wounds, illness, and starvation; she had no way of knowing whether her parents and sisters were alive and able to feed themselves. At the end of September, when the Nazis occupied Kiev in the Soviet Ukraine, soldiers slew almost thirty-four thousand Jews in the massacre at Babi Yar; in the same month Germany began constructing the gas chambers at Auschwitz. New tyrants were reenacting old atrocities, and no one knew whether they could be stopped. Personally, Rand felt powerless, although she characteristically expressed her powerlessness in anger and self-pity. “If I were a defender of Communism, I’d be a Hollywood millionaire by now, with a swimming pool and a private orchestra to play ‘The Internationale,’ “she wrote to a businessman acquaintance in September. She referred to herself as a proletarian capitalist. Mostly, she yearned for the resources to return to work on The Fountainhead as another person might long for a vacation.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, hope appeared. According to the account she later gave to friends and followers, she had purposely not told Mealand that her literary agent had decamped or that the chapters he had read were gathering dust on her desktop. She didn’t want him to think she was desperate for help. But he found out and insisted on introducing her to a few of his Paramount publishing contacts. After a false start with Little, Brown and Company, he and she decided to approach a bright young man who had just been hired as chief editor in the New York office of the Indiana-based Bobbs-Merrill Company. Earlier that year, Bobbs-Merrill had published a now-classic book-length exposé called The Red Decade: The Stalinist Penetration of America, by United Press’s former Moscow correspondent Eugene Lyons. It had kicked up a storm of angry controversy on the Left. That impressed Rand. Mealand made a phone call, and she dropped off the manuscript of The Fountainhead at the Bobbs-Merrill office on Park Avenue and Thirty-first Street, where she met the new young editor, Archibald Ogden. She noted, skeptically, that his dress was collegiate and his manner overly “palsy.” He reminded her of Peter Keating.
Just as with Rand’s first encounter with Cecil B. DeMille, there is another version of this story. The estimable Muriel Hall, Isabel Paterson’s executor, who worked for decades as a research editor at Time and Life, recalled Paterson’s having told her proudly that it was she, Paterson, who provided Rand with an introduction to Ogden at Bobbs-Merrill. “Pat had contacts there, and she could bludgeon people,” Hall said. “She told [Ogden]