Few people in India will recognise the name Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum. Yet she receives more Google searches in India than in any other country apart from the US, and her novels have sold over half a million copies here since 2005.
She is a towering figure in the literary world, a woman principally responsible for informing our conceptions of individuality, ambition and liberty. She was also an anomaly, a writer bent on the infallibility of rationality, yet largely remembered for her own irrational fears, manipulations and creation of her larger-than-life persona.
You may remember her better as Ayn Rand.
In her brilliant biography Ayn Rand and the World She Made, Anne C Heller sifts through the carefully constructed image created by Rand and her obstinately loyal followers. She deftly chronicles the life of the flesh-and-blood woman behind the behemoth successes of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
Rand is the brain behind Objectivism — the theory she famously espoused through her writings over her lifetime. Celebrating capitalism as “the only system ever evolved to operate solely on the basis of individual human reason”, she fought against every form of collective thought and action in society. Rand eloquently explained her philosophy as “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute”. She created these “supermen” in her novels in the form of Howard Roark and John Galt — fiercely individualist heroes whose ultimate aim was to realise their own ambition at whatever cost.
This philosophy earned Rand ample criticism through her meteoric life. Her call for individuals to be “selfish” and fight collectivism rankled those who viewed her teachings as rooted in hedonism. Orville Prescott, the tart The New York Times book critic, skewered The Fountainhead in a 1943 review, calling the world that Rand had created full of “dirty, crawling malice, animal lust, lechery and twisted conspiracies”. Rand viewed these critics as lower intellectuals who could not grasp the true meaning of her work. She would later write in her journal: “The average man doesn’t have the strength to do what is right at any cost, against all men. Only a genius can do that.”
A genius is what Rand aspired to be. Through the course of the book, Heller juxtaposes Rand’s own desires to succeed at any cost and to attain happiness through whatever means she saw fit.
More From This Section
Tracing the genesis of her philosophy to her suffering in the early 20th century anti-Semitic Russia, Heller gives us a glimpse of the young Rand — an awkward, intelligent and well-educated girl who began writing at the age of nine. Her formative years in the clutch of communism helped form the basis of her pro-capitalist philosophy. Rand found her way to America in 1926 and worked as a waitress, an office clerk and a reader for film companies to earn a living to support her love of writing. She first achieved critical fame with The Fountainhead in 1943, after which she went on to publish Atlas Shrugged in 1957. Although Heller details how these works were initially panned or misunderstood by critics, they went on to achieve high critical acclaim and a large following in the following decades.
The true strength of the biography lies in the exploration of Rand’s personal relationships through her life and how they demonstrate her own fragility and insecurities.
Her relationship with handsome, unassuming Frank O’Connor lays bare Rand’s own personal complexities and fears. The marriage is described as an unusual one, with Rand taking on the masculine, controlling facet of the bond, while O’Connor is portrayed as a passive cuckold — happy to bask in his wife’s relentless brilliance and give in to her violent moodiness.
Interestingly, Heller spends sparse time on Rand’s relationship with and influence on Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, for nearly two decades. A dedicated member of her inner circle, Greenspan would refer to Rand’s philosophy as “radiantly exact” and would claim that she “put the moral basis under capitalism” for him. Greenspan was heavily influenced by Rand’s views on money — a fact that was duly noted by journalists during the sub-prime mortgage collapse. Yet, in a footnote, Heller describes how his defence of the gold standard and faith in the self-interest of lending institutions were shaken after the financial crisis — when he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that he was in a “state of shocked belief”. Heller superficially explores Greenspan’s place in Rand’s Objectivist universe and we are denied a glimpse into the magnitude of her influence on American monetary policy leading up to the crisis.
Perhaps the most poignant and disturbing chapter in the biography is the painstaking recounting of the ill-fated affair that Rand instigated with her married protégé, Nathaniel Branden, 25 years her junior. Despite her adamant claim that she would never allow herself to become “that ludicrous figure of an old woman pursuing a younger man”, Rand’s obsession with Branden and his eventual betrayal drove her to the edge of reason, the very tool she advocated for navigating the world.
This perversion of the image that Rand created for herself is the very joy of Ayn Rand and the World She Made, as we are allowed to witness the inner workings of this enigmatic woman. Brilliant, intimidating and violent as she was, she fell prey to the sin of pride, covetousness and lust that ended up ruining not only her closest relationships, but the empire she had spent her life constructing.
The true irony of Rand’s life lies in her inability to find the happiness she so desperately craved. Despite her fame, her admirers and her place in history, the story of Rand’s life reads like the journey of a woman who is looking for something she does not know how to find. At the end of her days, she died of a congestive heart failure — or, as Heller romantically suggests, a broken heart.
AYN RAND AND THE WORLD SHE MADE
Anne C Heller
Tranquebar Press
567 pages; Rs 495
