Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [93]
The single most perceptive review of The Fountainhead appeared on May 16, 1943, in the Sunday edition of The New York Times. Archibald Ogden telephoned Rand in her apartment on East Thirty-fifth Street to read the review aloud to her. She didn’t want to hear it, she told him; she had already seen and heard enough. He answered that she would be happy to hear this. The reviewer was Lorine Pruette, a psychologist, a former Smith College professor, and an early feminist writer. She not only praised The Fountainhead as a masterful and thrilling tour de force; she predicted that it would cause all thoughtful readers to re-evaluate their basic attitudes about the pressing issues of the day. Calling the prose brilliant, beautiful, and bitter, she wrote, “Good novels of ideas are rare at any time. This is the only novel of ideas written by an American woman that [I] can recall.” Unlike Prescott and others, she understood the theme. It was not architecture. It was the inherent nobility of the autonomous individual as he defies collective power. “Rand has taken her stand against collectivism, ‘the rule of the second-hander, that ancient monster,’” Pruette wrote. “She has written a hymn in praise of the individual.” The psychologist identified Ellsworth Toohey as an illustration of the Fascist mind in action. She cited key passages from Roark’s defining courtroom speech, which deeply pleased Rand. Most important, she was not afraid to call attention to a controversial political and philosophical issue, collectivism, risking disapprobation by the outspoken left.
Rand later said that Pruette’s review had saved her world. It was the first to refer to individualism, a concept she passionately wanted to see discussed in print. Only by explicit reference to it could she hope to reach “my kind of readers,” she told a friend, echoing her father’s phrase in tribute to her. At that historical moment—after the Hitler-Stalin Pact had come apart and Stalin was marshaling millions of men to fight German troops on Soviet soil—the Soviet Union was an official military ally of the United States and the Roosevelt administration had taken to promoting it as a freedom-loving friend. To criticize collectivism or publicly advocate capitalism or even civil liberties was at best to commit a social gaffe, she said, and chronicles of the period bear her out. To her mind, a fear of retaliation or rebuke was the only plausible reason for reviewers to be silent about her theme. Her message was so overstated, she remarked to a business acquaintance (“it’s practically in every line”), that critics had to make a deliberate decision to ignore it. All the more reason to laud Pruette.
Once The New York Times had identified the novel’s theme, other publications gradually took it up. By the end of the war, all forms of government collectivism had permanently lost much of their popular appeal and would, in fact, become a political taboo, and “individualism” would re-enter the language of respectable discourse—chiefly, Rand suggested, as a result of her efforts and Paterson’s to keep the word alive. She was not a timid propagandist. Nevertheless, it took half a decade before most readers of The Fountainhead consciously noticed that it was a tract as well as a story.
What drove demand for the book, at least at first, was the titillating sex, along with the contrarian spectacle of a red-blooded American hero serenely blowing up a Depression-era public housing project. At lunch counters and cocktail parties, in beauty parlors and at bridge games, Dominique’s masochism and Roark’s triumphant selfishness