Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [9]
That’s where stories—both those she read and those she was beginning to write—came in. At the age of eight or nine, just before creating her own first stories, she read two children’s books that electrified her hopes and helped to set her course; one of them would become a kind of template for some of her most famous work. The first, a mini-biography belonging to her sister Natasha, recounted the lonely girlhood of Catherine the Great, the late-eighteenth-century czarina who, half a century after the reign of Peter, brought the ideas of the European Enlightenment to Russia. It presented Catherine as an unusually bright little girl who was overlooked and underestimated by her aristocratic family and friends because she was odd and homely: “something between a misfit and an ugly duckling,” as Rand remembered the character. Yet Catherine was destined to outshine all her prettier rivals and bring a culturally backward Russia closer to the industrially advancing West. In the story, a fortune-teller at a party sees Catherine’s future greatness in the shape of an invisible crown engraved on her brow, much to the envy and disbelief of the other girls and their mothers. Young Rand was sure that she, too, was meant for an exceptional fate, and wished that, like the fortune-teller in the story, someone would notice the special mark on her brow. She was a child of destiny, she told herself. Nobody knew it yet, but everybody would find out. Like many of Rand’s predictions about her future, this one would come true.
Later in the same year, 1914, she encountered a boys’ serial adventure story called The Mysterious Valley in one of the French children’s magazines her mother subscribed to. Written by Maurice Champagne, an author of children’s books, and illustrated by René Giffey, it was set in British-ruled India in 1911—contemporaneous with Rand’s time, but set in an exotic place, so the story’s heart-stopping action may have seemed plausible to her. As the tale opens, a dashing British infantry captain named Cyrus Paltons and four of his fellow officers have been snatched from the field by trained Bengali tigers and carried to a clique of bloodthirsty Hindu shamans in a hidden valley in the Himalayan Mountains of West Bengal—a beautiful valley with noticeable resemblances to the hiding place of the striking businessmen in Rand’s 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged. Cyrus, imprisoned with his peers deep in a cave beneath the valley floor, is brave, purposeful, and, according to Bill Bucko’s translation, “arrogant,” a characteristic that will become a marker for Ayn Rand’s future heroes. He is also handsome. The original pen-and-ink illustrations show him as, in Rand’s words many years later, “my present kind of hero: tall, long-legged, wearing soldier’s leggings but no jacket, just … an open-collared shirt, torn in front, open very low, sleeves rolled at the elbows and hair falling down over one eye.” Gripping the bars of a bamboo cage, he shouts defiant threats at the death-goddess-worshipping Hindus who surround him, while his friends cower in a corner. Meanwhile, a rescue team made up of two junior officers and a supremely rational French archaeologist track Cyrus and the others to the cave. After many brushes with gruesome forms of sacrificial death, Cyrus escapes and leads his friends, rescuers, and a beautiful young British woman (soon to be his wife) safely out of the valley. As they stand looking back from above, fires and a flood consume the valley and erase its bloodthirsty inhabitants from existence.
There are some remarkable things about The Mysterious Valley. Like Rudyard Kipling’s stories of the same period, it is a romance about civilization and its adversaries. But these are specifically death-worshipping adversaries, a theme Rand was to visit again and again. In her mature fiction and essays, death worship, or “whim-worship,” as she