Chekhov’s Mistess

Why Does Everyone Care Who John Galt is?

In “Considering the Last Romantic, Ayn Rand, at 100” Ed Rothstein at The NY Times writes about one of the most overrated authors (my words, not his) of all time. Upon the occasion of her 100th birth anniversary (a birthday shared with James Joyce) Rothstein reminds us that over 15 million copies of her books have been sold, and that The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged still sell over 130,000 copies per year. Why?

That is an unfathomable question, but before I throw any answers out there, I should say as a disclaimer that I have not read the Fountainhead. I have read Atlas Shrugged and Ms. Rand’s first novel, We the Living, which is the one that I do recommend to anyone who happens to ask.

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I was first introduced to Ayn (sounds like dine without the d ) Rand’s work by a friend of mine. This is significant only in that this friend happened to be a very very inheritedly wealthy man who espoused the ideas of Rand’s “Objectivism.” At the time I didn’t really understand the connection between her literature and her hyper-AdamSmithian philosophy. That came later.

So I read her books. I read We the Living, which loosely tells the story of Ms. Rand’s experience as a young woman in Soviet Russia. It’s a great novel as far as I remember and tells an important story. But telling important stories is where she runs into trouble.

I read somewhere that Rand considers herself an author before a philosopher. I’ve never believed that and reading Atlas Shrugged I always felt that giving us a lesson was far more important to her than writing well. Sure, Hugo and Tolstoy and many others had their axes to grind, but rarely is their work totally subservient to it. Her characters might as well wear white or black cowboy hats and every bit of dialogue reads like the script from some overwrought early “talkie” film.

So again, I ask, why are these novels so popular? Perhaps it is her idealism. Is it the pursuit of the “ideal man” who was apparently her authorial raison d’être that excites her readers? Perhaps they seek through her the delineation between good and bad, a sort of “moral fiction” that confirms to us even today that we’re on the right track in our winner take all society. As a culture, we look for strong heroes, leaders!, not ninnies. And that’s what Ms. Rand gave us in her Roarks and Galts. Indeed, in Tobias Wolff’s novel Old School, Ms. Rand’s characters are said to have “no relatives , or even friends – only inferiors.”

Wolff’s character is obsessed with The Fountainhead until she gives a talk at his school. Then:

“The problem was that I could no longer read Ayn Rand’s sentences without hearing her voice. And hearing her voice, I saw her face; to be exact the face she’d turned on me when I sneezed. Her disgust had power. This was not girlish shudder, this was spiritual disgust, and it forced on me a vision of the poor specimen under scrutiny, chapped lips, damp white face, rheumy eyes and all. She made me feel that to be sick was contemptible. There couldn’t have been any other reason for her to despise me so, not at that moment, before I’d offended her by mentioning Hemingway.”

Thinking again about when I was introduced to these books, I lived in Orange Country California, one the wealthiest and absolutely most conservative places in the country. Christopher Cox, one of the most conservative members of congress, is the representative for this area and he was, I understand, a big fan of Objectivism, which has lurking beneath its thin surface a strong current of elitism. Many years later I studied economics at New York University, housing many proponents of the Vienna-school – very free-market – and I think that is where I really began to see the difference between Rand’s made-up world and the one we live in. As Rothstein says:

“Her moral justifications of capitalism shaped the thinking of the young Alan Greeenspan (now Federal Reserve Chairman) and other conservative acolytes. She declared it permissible to proclaim ‘I want’ and to act to fulfill that demand.”

But despite this overt message underlying Rand’s fiction, I don’t think the millions of Rand readers see her books as political (that is based on my statistical analysis of a handful of people as a sample for those millions). Talking recently to a newly minted Rand reading enthusiast, she (a liberal) had no interest in all that, she just loved The Fountainhead.

In the words of Wallace Shawn as Vizzini in “The Princess Bride:”

“Inexplicable!”

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p.s. I owe my wife for pointing out the Wolff passage.

Read widely, think well, and write often.

Update: Reader Brian points out that Wallace Shawn’s quote is “Inconceivable!”

comments

In the words of Wallace Shawn as Vizzini in “The Princess Bride:”

“Inexplicable!”

I think you mean:

“Inconceivable!”

    – Brian (02/03  at  10:03 AM)

You know Brian, I think you’re right. My memory is lapsing.

    – Bud Parr (02/03  at  10:34 AM)

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• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: February 02, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

• Comments:2
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