“The Fountainhead” hymns skyscrapers as monuments to human ingenuity and free will, but the rhetoric it applies to the humans inside them can be as naturalistic as anything out of Dreiser or Norris: “Elevators drew a stream of human fuel and spat it out.” Roark’s tormentors, the craven collectivists and “second-handers” living off others’ visions and work, can be preposterously named or physically defective, but the free will cherished by his own camp seems less a clean jet from a fountain than some murky water cycle of self-pity and pointless gesture. Dominique at one point tells Roark why she has decided to marry his slack, despicable opposite: “What else could I offer you? The things people sacrifice are so little. I’ll give you my marriage to Peter Keating. I’ll refuse to permit myself happiness in their world. I’ll take suffering. That will be my answer to them, and my gift to you.”

After the war, Rand and O’Connor returned to Southern California, where she did some screenwriting for Hal Wallis, volunteered herself as a friendly witness to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and unhappily watched over the filming of “The Fountainhead,” which starred Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal as Roark and Dominique. Rand was furious when Roark’s most important line in the novel’s big trial scene—“I wish to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others”—was cut from the film.

Settled companionably enough in a glassy, sharp-edged Richard Neutra house, Rand and O’Connor called each other Fluff and Cubbyhole. He poured his efforts into gardening and the maintenance of his wife’s working comfort. Often sloppy at home, Rand cultivated a striking, geometric look for the cameras and for her growing public. She wore gowns by Adrian, the costume designer who, when still Adrian Greenberg, had promoted her from pleb to aristocrat in “The King of Kings.” The diagonal slash of her hairdo was soon complemented by a cape, and the jabbings of her cigarette holder punctuated her dogmatic, accented conversation.

Nathan Blumenthal, a nineteen-year-old college student, entered the O’Connors’ household, after sending some fan letters, in March, 1950. The young man had more or less memorized “The Fountainhead,” and his devotion to Rand’s vision earned him an invitation to visit. Blumenthal, who later became Nathaniel Branden, started introducing Rand to other young disciples, including his future wife, Barbara Weidman. Rand regarded them all as “children of The Fountainhead,” though Nathan and Barbara were the central devotees; when they moved to New York for graduate study, Rand and her husband followed. For part of the trip O’Connor was literally chained to the manuscript of “Atlas Shrugged,” Rand’s enormous novel-in-progress, which travelled in a case that came with a handcuff. He eventually had to share the novel’s dedication with Branden.

When the relationship between author and acolyte turned physical, in late 1954, the four parties involved—Ayn, Frank, Nathaniel, and Barbara—sat down for a rational discussion of what Ayn had decided would be a relatively brief affair. In the event, it lasted fourteen years. “Seen from a certain perspective,” Heller writes, the attractive, reverent Branden “made an ideal mistress, even as Frank had become an ideal wife.”

The young libertarians beginning to gather at Rand’s feet in her Murray Hill apartment called themselves, with less irony than they believed, the Collective. Among them was Alan Greenspan, whom Rand nicknamed the Undertaker. By most accounts, the future Federal Reserve chairman behaved with less slavish subordination than the other self-professed individualists, who regarded Rand, according to Burns, “as a genius without compare.” The philosopher’s most famous directive was “Check your premises,” but those in her orbit never dared question hers. They adopted Rand’s tastes in everything from furniture to music (Rachmaninoff, good; Brahms, bad), and tightened themselves into a circle that came to be governed by loyalty tests and living-room show trials. Nathaniel Branden became the group’s disciplinarian.

In the mid-fifties, the Collective spent Saturday nights reading the six hundred and forty-five thousand words of “Atlas Shrugged” slowly rolling out of Rand’s typewriter. (She finished the book in another Benzedrine burst.) No one in this preview audience ever thought to suggest that a slim, schematic parable—an entertaining, pro-capitalist lesson on the scale of, say, “Animal Farm”—might be getting smothered by the torrents of narrative and speechifying that the author was unleashing from Monday to Friday.

Dagny Taggart, the book’s heroine, is the beautiful, capable heir to a great railroad fortune. She struggles to save Taggart Transcontinental from the mismanagement of her self-loathing brother and from the army of profit-hating government regulators who are turning the United States into an ever less productive place. Dagny is in love with the industrialist Hank Rearden, whom the bureaucrats won’t allow to produce sufficient quantities of a new miracle alloy that could speed the nation back to growth and prosperity. Dagny is also trying to find a man who, worn down by others’ phony altruism and incompetence, has abandoned his invention of a motor that had even more wondrous potential than Rearden Metal. Meanwhile, her former love, a wealthy copper magnate named Francisco d’Anconia, pretends to be a feckless playboy while actually helping create John Galt’s laissez-faire redoubt in the mountains of Colorado. Along with a forest of straw men even less appetizing than the second-handers of “The Fountainhead,” Rand introduces readers to a dashing pirate named Ragnar Danneskjöld, who plunders the government’s ill-gotten tax-takings whenever they’re available on the high seas.

The novel drops enormous set pieces of free-market oratory upon the “moochers” and “looters” and “college-infected parasites” whose world will soon, thanks to Galt’s secret recruitings, be robbed of all the brainy enterprise it needs in order to run. Rand was always against the first use of force (her pirate somehow gets a pass on this issue), but throughout “Atlas Shrugged” the narrative voice of this implacably anti-Communist author is a bellows of Stalinist bad breath. In explaining why the passengers on a Taggart train are all unconsciously complicit in the bureaucratic buck-passing that will soon cause an accident that takes their lives, Rand notes, “The man in Roomette 3, Car No. 11, was a sniveling little neurotic who wrote cheap little plays into which, as a social message, he inserted cowardly little obscenities to the effect that all businessmen were scoundrels.” The only words missing are “stooge” and “lackey.”

Whether Dagny will opt out of the dying real world and settle herself in humming Galt’s Gulch is one of the novel’s many foregone conclusions masquerading as matters of suspense. She is certainly ready for a change, knowing as she does “that an emotion was a sum totaled by an adding machine of the mind,” and that nothing leaves an afterglow like rape—so long as one keeps the act attached to those frequently checked philosophical premises. As Francisco d’Anconia, the most cerebral pseudo-Latin lover in literary history, explains to Hank Rearden, “Just as physical action unguided by an idea is a fool’s self-fraud, so is sex when cut off from one’s code of values.”

“Atlas Shrugged” does have its compelling moments: Dagny’s windblown first run through the Rockies on the new John Galt Line she has had built with beautiful aquamarine-colored Rearden Metal; the primitive squalor into which the town of Starnesville sinks once a do-gooder scheme drives its factory to ruin; the pompous, delusional directives from government entities like the “office of the Morale Conditioner.” But in Rand’s fiction all moments must stretch into hours, and the book’s real element, starting with the inert past tense of its title, is not shiny Rearden Metal but lead. This is how people crack a smile in “Atlas Shrugged”: “She saw the look of that luminous gaiety which transcends the solemn by proclaiming the great innocence of a man who has earned the right to be light-hearted.” The problem is temperamental, not linguistic; the books would have been no more concise and no less clumsy had she written them in Russian.

“I hope this is enough fibre to get us through the winter.” Facebook

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Rand may be, in an aesthetic sense, the most totalitarian novelist ever to have sat down at a desk. She would have mocked the “intentional fallacy,” the term critics of her era used to describe the mistaken notion that a work of art can be understood through its creator’s expressed goals. If anything, she believed in an intentional imperative. Richard Halley, the resident composer of Galt’s Gulch, thanks Dagny for admiring his work “for the things I wished to be admired.” When it came to readers, Rand wanted only the second-handers she otherwise pronounced so despicable.

Whittaker Chambers, whose own anti-Communism did not make him an admirer of Rand, excoriated the book, declaring, “From almost any page of ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber—go!’ ” Actually, Rand and her heroes were only Pied Pipering readers to get a flashlight and take the book under a cozy blanket. “Atlas Shrugged” never offered any serious alternative to the social order; whatever Rand’s intention, the novel was not a call to arms but an invitation to escape. The book could never, in fact, have been any shorter, because it needed to feel like a whole substitute world, a full-blown reassuring place—you’re right, they’re wrong; you’re special, they’re not—into which the discoverer can jump, as into a magic wardrobe, and then live, happily, airlessly, for weeks of reading and rereading.

Burns recognizes Rand’s fiction to be “part of the underground curriculum of American adolescence,” but, like Heller, she is too willing to see the author’s dictates about “romantic realism” as a sincerely offered aesthetic, rather than as a post-facto justification for Rand’s artistic incapacities. The novelist who invented Howard Roark and John Galt needed to insist that literary characters be “abstract projections,” lest her own paper-airplane creations fall to the library floor. “The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature,” written by Rand in the years after “Atlas Shrugged” and trounced by critics, shows her to be not only a poor reader but also poorly read. In this book and in a later one, “The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers,” Rand generally relies on the same little shelf of Western literature (Hugo, Dumas) that she managed to read when very young, between movies. Her opinions about anything beyond it are strident and bizarre: “Anna Karenina,” in which Tolstoy “attacked man’s desire for happiness and advocated its sacrifice to conformity,” is “the most evil book in serious literature.” Shakespeare, with his belief in a character’s “innate ‘tragic flaw,’ ” is the “spiritual father” of naturalism, whose deterministic view of man will start doing real damage in the nineteenth century. For a work of literature that truly believes in “man’s integrity,” Rand would recommend “the greatest play in the history of Romantic literature”—“Cyrano de Bergerac.” The O. Henry she describes bears more resemblance to the candy bar than to the story writer: his “unique characteristic is the pyrotechnical virtuosity of an inexhaustible imagination projecting the gaiety of a benevolent, almost childlike sense of life.” Rand liked to shock highbrows by sticking up for Mickey Spillane, supposedly for his unfashionable belief in clear-cut good versus clear-cut evil. She hoped, for a while, to see Farrah Fawcett play Dagny Taggart in a television mini-series of “Atlas Shrugged,” since she had discerned the ways in which “Charlie’s Angels” favored romantic aspiration over naturalistic squalor. During the late nineteen-seventies, Rand never missed the program on Wednesday nights.

According to Heller, Rand was “shriveled” (Burns says “shattered”) by the reviews of “Atlas Shrugged.” But the book sold well, and marked the beginning of Rand’s real, crankish fame. Arrestingly abrasive, she commanded in the nineteen-sixties roughly the same sort of national attention that Americans accorded another atheist, Madalyn Murray O’Hair. Mike Wallace, Playboy, and Johnny Carson all interviewed her, and she was a big draw even on countercultural campuses. Writing another novel seemed beyond her, and she took to composing philosophy straight up, without the cardboard fictional struts. She remained pro-Aristotle, anti-Plato, and anti-Kant—a godless evangelist for a fair-dealing society of “traders” as imagined by John Galt, whom Rand, according to Heller, “formed the habit of quoting . . . as an independent authority who proved her points.”

Nathaniel Branden spread her message in lectures and on tapes, developing what Burns calls a “sprawling empire” before his long affair with Rand reached its catastrophic end. The mentor discontinued sexual relations with the pupil during her long depression over the “Atlas Shrugged” reviews—Branden noted how, like her readers, she began escaping into the book’s “alternate reality”—and by the time she was ready to resume them Branden had fallen in love with a younger woman. He stalled, lied, and eventually came clean, provoking in August of 1968 a ferocious bitch-slapping from the woman he once called Mrs. Logic. Rand administered the denunciation and physical blows in the presence of both Branden’s ex-wife and her own husband. From this point on, instead of being her “intellectual heir,” as Rand had once designated him, Branden became, Heller says, the living embodiment of all her second-handing literary villains. Modern editions of “Atlas Shrugged” have dropped him from its dedication, leaving that page to the long-suffering Frank O’Connor.

Rand’s life was filled with lesser breaks and banishments. Patrons (the journalist Isabel Paterson), allies (the economist Ludwig von Mises), publishers (Random House’s Bennett Cerf), disciples (the philosopher John Hospers), and even a long-lost sister who showed up from Russia—all got the heave-ho. Her friendships could reach fulfillment only when she ended them; the dismissals and excommunications, the refusal to engage any further, seem to have acted as a thrilling validation of her own rightness. Heller quotes one friend who says that Rand “could be immensely empathetic if she saw things in you that were like her. But if she didn’t see herself in some aspect of you, she didn’t empathize at all. You weren’t real to her.”

The postwar conservative movement never knew what to do with her. Businessmen gratefully took up her books, but her atheism made them nervous. She told William F. Buckley, Jr., on first meeting him, that he was “too intelligent to believe in God,” and she was bothered by “frequent allusions to religion” from even Barry Goldwater, the most secularly libertarian candidate the Republican Party ever nominated. She had no time at all for Ronald Reagan, and, even before the emergence of the Christian right, was out of step with conservatives on many big issues of the moment. Her principles made her oppose not only the draft but also the war in Vietnam. Burns credits Objectivism with helping “to moor the libertarian movement to the right side of the political spectrum” instead of some anarchic docking on the left, but Rand inevitably found fault with the Libertarians who organized themselves into an actual political party, calling them plagiarizing “scum.” In trying to estimate Rand’s influence during the late nineteen-sixties, Burns resorts to detailed discussion of ideological fissures within the Young Americans for Freedom (“There were definite limits to YAF’s antistatism”), which suggests that Rand’s impact in the political realm has been a matter for footnotes rather than anything fundamental.