Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [92]
Rand never commented publicly on this review, but it must have kindled both fury and fear, especially because positive prepublication buzz had led her to expect intelligent, or at least intelligible, commentary. More cause for distress quickly followed. The Chicago Daily Tribune, among many out-of-town newspapers, endorsed the novel but also mistook it for a story about architecture. At Isabel Paterson’s paper, the New York Herald Tribune, a mysterious unnamed conservative female writer refused to review it, Paterson told Rand, and Irita Van Doren assigned the book to Albert Guerard, later a celebrated professor of English at Stanford University. He angered Rand by identifying Roark with Nietzsche’s Superman and by placing himself warily on either side of the fence, as she colorfully put it. (Whoever the mysterious female refusenik was, Rand exclaimed to Paterson, she deserved to be damned for letting Guerard get his hands on The Fountainhead. Some years later this review would become a bitter point of reference in an escalating quarrel between the women.) Diana Trilling, writing for The Nation, was positively indignant, calling the book “an orgy of glorification” of the building trades and of their ten-foot-tall, flame-haired, capital-G Genius Howard Roark. Mrs. Trilling spoke for many reviewers when she wrote, “Anyone who is taken in by [The Fountainhead] deserves a stern lecture on paper rationing.”
Unknown to Mrs. Trilling, a scarcity of paper, if not actual wartime rationing, had played an active part in the publication of The Fountainhead. Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which took place three days before Bobbs-Merrill signed Rand’s contract, the U.S. government warned of coming civilian shortages of everything from gasoline to wood fiber as it mobilized the army. If the book contract had been delayed by a week, Rand’s editor, Archibald Ogden, later confided to her, the company would have canceled the contract; it couldn’t have guaranteed access to the paper to print such an unusually long novel, given its other publishing commitments. As it was, shortages partly explain a riddle of the novel’s structure: why the alluring Dominique Francon doesn’t appear until late in chapter 9, when, as Rand well knew, the rules of melodrama call for a love interest to be present from the start. To save paper, she had voluntarily cut out about a third of the manuscript before it went to press, eliminating, among other things, an early sexual liaison between Roark and a young stage actress named Vesta Dunning. Dunning’s hunger for adulation mirrored Gail Wynand’s drive for popular influence, she decided, and so was thematically repetitive. Besides, she reflected, Roark’s affair with Dunning—which also included a “rape” scene—diluted the intensity of his relationship with Dominique. Yet because there had been no time to rewrite chapters 1 through 9, the disappearance of the stage actress left a romantic gap. As a result, Rand always thought that the first quarter of the novel read more slowly than the rest.
Paper scarcity may also have contributed to the slow pace of the novel’s climb to best-sellerdom. Until the war in Europe ended in the spring of 1945, Rand regularly protested that Bobbs-Merrill was assigning too much paper to other books and not enough to hers and that the policy of allotting equal proportions of paper to all books slowed shipments of The Fountainhead to bookstores, sabotaged sales, and kept her off the regional best-seller lists. “What about our other authors?” Bobbs-Merrill’s production department exclaimed. That was their problem, she replied. The Fountainhead was her book, her chance, and she wasn’t going to let it slip by out of an ill-conceived concern for others, whose