On 17 January, 1926 Alisa Rosenbaum, the future novelist and philosopher later known as Ayn Rand, left the Soviet Union for a new life in America shouting to her family as she left: ‘I will return famous.’ She was 21.
Driven from a young age by forceful ambition not just to succeed as a writer but to impress on the world her ideas about individualism, profit, wealth and anti-communism, she moved first to stay with cousins in Chicago but wasted little time in assimilating, changing her name and going to Hollywood – although she never lost her strong accent. Her brazen determination resulted in a meeting with Cecil B. DeMille, who became her early mentor and Rand, working as a scriptwriter, learned fast. What Alexandra Popoff does so well in this biography for the Yale Jewish Lives series is show how the aspiring writer squirreled away everything she saw for future use so, for example, the ending of The Fountainhead, which has an ascension to the top of a construction project, was an idea borrowed from an early DeMille film.
In 1929 she married a handsome actor with Irish roots, Frank O’Connor, who was to subordinate his life almost entirely to hers as she became the breadwinner, he the rock and ultimately an alcoholic. Rand decided she did not want to have children as it would interfere with her life goals and Frank appears to have gone along with this and to have offered her constant moral support and encouragement. ‘Frank was the fuel’, she wrote later in life, which enabled her to carry on before she made money from her writing. He also, which was key, contributed authentic American expressions for her work.
The bulk of this biography is devoted to Rand’s writing with particular emphasis on the bestselling novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). The hero of the Fountainhead is Howard Roark, an architect. But the theme of the novel is not so much architecture as the story of what happens to a genius in single minded pursuit of what he sees as the truth. A similar hero, John Galt, who stands for innovation, self-reliance and freedom from government interference, fills the pages of Atlas Shrugged. Rand received some brutal reviews for this, which compared her philosophy with fascism.
During World War Two Rand was totally absorbed by domestic policies and appeared steadfastly unconcerned about Jewish issues or the Holocaust. Popoff writes that even when the threat of Hitler was clear, she continued to promote notions of power and success and did not write about the War or anything that dealt with pain and suffering, experiences at the core of the Jewish psyche. According to Popoff, Rand did not learn until 1946 about the deaths of her own family in Leningrad most of whom perished during the siege of Leningrad. They were malnourished and freezing, living together in one flat.
However, it appears that while her ethnicity did not matter to her, anti-Semitism did concern her deeply. Rand had joined the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA) in 1944 on condition that they would fight communism not communists. She wanted to educate Americans about Communist ideology and was concerned by the way the notorious House un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) linked communism with Judaism. She resigned from the MPA in 1947 over a conflict with a known anti-Semite and again in the 1960’s withdrew her support for another organisation tainted with anti-Semitism.
The subtitle for Popoff’s biography – Writing a Gospel of Success – is well chosen as the novels, in spite of their fast-paced plots were really vehicles for her political manifestos; an uncompromising belief in individualism as a superior force to statism. She called her philosophy Objectivism which stood in opposition to Collectivism and described herself as both a writer of fiction and a philosopher. But the latter came to predominate and when asked by her publishers in the wake of early success for a short biography she responded that she was uninterested in family, childhood, friends or feelings. She was only interested in the life of the mind, ideas and intellectual pursuits. An attitude which does not make the biographer’s task any easier.
Ayn Rand is an acquired taste. It’s a taste I briefly acquired as a student after reading the thought provoking but at times indigestible The Fountainhead but quickly shed. This biography does little to make her a more sympathetic character but it helps explain her complex character.
Anne Sebba’s new book the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz is published in March