Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [95]
Paterson mulled this over and followed up, perhaps during a vacation she persuaded Rand and O’Connor to take at her Connecticut country house in July; Rand had been working much too hard and needed a rest, Paterson told her. The novelist was grateful. In her fifties, she would tell an admirer that those two weeks were the only formal vacation she had ever taken; she didn’t mention her childhood trips to the Baltic Sea or the Black Sea in summer, as, by that time, she avoided mentioning anything about her Russian past. Paterson asked what it would take to convince her that The Fountainhead was a success. “A sale of one hundred thousand copies,” Rand immediately replied, watching as a look of disbelief crossed Paterson’s face. No doubt the more experienced writer thought the younger woman’s expectations bordered on lunacy and invited further disappointment. Very few books sell that well, Paterson pointed out.
But the determined novelist, who had clearly given the issue some thought, insisted that nothing short of such a sale could guarantee that she had reached the right minds in the country—a group very much resembling Albert Jay Nock’s famous concept of “the Remnant,” a model of political deliverance he introduced in a famous essay called “Isaiah’s Job,” published in 1936. Nock, doubtful that pandering to the public at large would ever win large numbers of people over to his conservative viewpoint, conjured a conservative Remnant made up of a scattered, chosen few in every generation who would stand fast against the fickle masses and build a new society when the old one crumbled. This, of course, is practically a summary of Rand’s next novel, Atlas Shrugged. In any case, Rand eventually won the argument. One hundred thousand copies of The Fountainhead would be sold in 1945 alone.
By now, in spite of occasional bickering, Rand and Paterson had designated each other “sisters” in a figurative family of shared values and personal grit. “Really, those women were enormously brave,” Paterson’s old friend Muriel Hall reflected in 2004. In the 1940s, “they were given the cold shoulder by almost everyone they met—they were scorned” by the great majority of liberals, she said. So they championed each other. During the year 1943, Paterson favorably mentioned The Fountainhead and its creator eight times in her weekly Herald Tribune books column. She advised her “little sister [from] St. Petersburg” how to manage business disputes with Bobbs-Merrill over delayed press runs and paperback reprint rights, especially after the summer of 1943, when Ogden left the company to lead the Council on Books in Wartime. Rand, in turn, praised The God of the Machine to every influential conservative she met, even sending a long letter to Paterson’s editor, Earle Balch, at G. P. Putnam’s Sons, urging him to get behind what she assured him was the most important book in centuries. Sounding like the nineteenth-century Russian intellectual she essentially was, she wrote, “It takes a book to save or destroy the world.” Putnam might well have filed her letter under “agitator” or “eccentric,” as her own publisher was beginning to be inclined to do.
In late fall, 1943, sales of The Fountainhead began to rise dramatically. Readers had begun to tell one another about the tale of lust and defiance they had read, and other readers bought the book. By Thanksgiving, after two hurried new printings by the Bobbs-Merrill Company, eighteen thousand copies were in readers’ hands, an impressive sale for a novel by a little-known author.
D. L. Chambers, Bobbs-Merrill’s budget-conscious president, in town from Indianapolis, phoned and asked Rand to meet him for lunch. Observing that sales had gained momentum, he proposed a deal. If she would agree to waive a scheduled increase in her royalties, from 10 percent to 15 percent after the ten-thousandth copy had been sold, he would match