Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [94]
While sales still stalled, however, Rand was understandably irritated with her publisher for the few small, conventional ads it took out for the book, and Ogden lacked the power to persuade the ad department to take a bolder tack. So she decided to raise private money for an ad campaign focused on her ideas. The day after Pruette’s review appeared, she mailed a copy of it to DeWitt Emery, president of the Pittsburgh-based National Small Business Men’s Association and an early supporter of her suspended political organization. She asked him to endorse her cause with potential donors, since, she argued, greater sales of The Fountainhead would benefit all political conservatives. The public mood “is going our way,” she argued, but the nation’s influential intellectuals had imposed a blockade against the dissemination of conservative ideas. The Fountainhead provided the heavy artillery to overpower the blockade. Novels moved people emotionally first and intellectually second, she explained to Emery, and this made them the most compelling kind of propaganda. She knew this because she had witnessed the power of nineteenth-century novels to transform her native country and provoke revolution. American Reds also knew it, she argued, which explained why they were so “savagely” bent on maintaining their hold over the creators and purveyors of ideas in Hollywood and New York. In case anyone suspected that she was trying to line her pockets through accelerated sales, she offered to turn over a share of her royalties to all donors until every dollar spent had been repaid.
She couldn’t fund the campaign herself because she was again out of money. Her thousand-dollar advance from Bobbs-Merrill had long since disappeared into rent, groceries, and an occasional cafeteria dinner. Although by midsummer The Fountainhead was already moving toward the black side of the ledger, she would have to wait to collect any royalties until a six- to nine-month accounting period had passed. At the invitation of Richard Mealand and Frances Hazlitt, she went back to work full time at Paramount.
In her spare hours, she set up luncheon meetings with Emery’s friends and others who could, if persuaded, give or lend her the ten thousand dollars she estimated she needed to advertise the book. Despite the power of her arguments, her lunch companions were hard-pressed to believe that a novel—especially, perhaps, one written by a woman—could advance their cause against the monster Roosevelt. After months of crusading, including arranging for an intermediary’s approach to the du Pont family, her only prospective donor was a Kalamazoo, Michigan, fishing-tackle manufacturer named Monroe Shakespeare. This first experience with fund-raising added a crust of bitter personal disappointment to her disenchantment with Republican conservatives.
During this period, O’Connor was determined to help out. He found a job as a sales clerk in a cigar store, probably earning the New Deal—mandated minimum wage of thirty cents an hour, and another job selling shoes. Able, self-effacing, charming, and droll, he endeared himself to the shoe-store owner, who asked him to stay on as a manager. He might have accepted and excelled at the job had Rand’s fortunes not quickly changed. At the moment, however, financial hardship, anxiety over the fate of The Fountainhead, and embarrassment at (as she saw it) hawking her book to anti-intellectual businessmen reinforced her feeling of living in “a gray desert.” For a time, she practiced lowering her expectations. She told Isabel Paterson that if The Fountainhead stopped selling—if it went the way of We the Living—she would resign herself to working at a dead-end job and writing only at night, for future generations. That would be her life. When Paterson, herself the author of eight moderately successful novels as well as The God of the Machine, asked why Rand was placing so much emphasis