Below The Beltway

Ayn Rand died twenty seven years ago, and yet her novels and ideas remain as widely distributed, controversial, and inspiring today as they were when they were first written. Both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged continue to sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year, and when The Modern Library asked readers to name the best books of the 20th Century, all four of Rand’s novels ended up in the top ten.

So, who was this Ayn Rand, and how did she go from being a young girl in St. Petersburg, Russia to become a woman who continues to influence political debate in the United States nearly three decades after she died ?

That’s the question that Anne C. Heller sets out to answer in Ayn Rand and the World She Made, and she does an excellent job of shedding light on the life and times of a woman who kept much of his personal history private.

While many of the details of Rand’s life and career are already familiar to those who know her work, Heller does bring to light many new details regarding Rand’s life before she came to the United States, specifically the hellish existence that her family was put through in the years immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution. Rand’s father, for example, was a successful pharmacist who saw his business confiscated and his property taken by the state, an action which raised the anger and indignation of the young Alissa Rosenbaum which can be traced to her later writing and her defense of capitalism.

There are other interesting tidbits from Rand’s days in Russia that Heller, who spent much time researching archives and interviewing family members in the former Soviet Union, managed to uncover. For example, one of the few close friends she had during those days was Olga Nabokov, the sister of another famed expatriate Russian writer, Vladimir Nabokov and daughter of one of the high-ranking officials in the Russian Provisional Government that was ultimately overthrown in the October 1917 Revolution. Like the Nabokov family, Rand’s family fled St. Petersburg in the early days of the Revolution but, instead of fleeing Russia, they returned to St. Petersburg and Rand endured several hellish years under Communist rule. It wasn’t until 1926 that Rand was finally able to escape to a new life in America.

Overall, Heller does an excellent job of tracing the life — the good, the bad, and the sometimes very ugly — of Rand’s life. On some level, it comes across as a sad tale of a woman who, in the beginning, was enthused by the power of ideas and individual liberty who, in the end, closed herself off in the echo chamber that was 1960’s-style Objectivism. The consequences, for Rand, for others, and for Objectivism itself were disastrous in more was than one, but Heller does a fabulous job of showing how, and why, this happened. It seems clear, for example, that Rand reacted badly to even the mildest forms of criticism and, with limited exceptions such as Ludwig von Mises and Alan Greenspan, tolerated almost no disagreement on even the most trivial elements of her philosophy.

Much of the last third of the book is spent discussing the legendary affair between Rand and Nathaniel Branden that ultimately led to the end of Objectivism as an organized movement. Without being judgmental, at least not at the start, Heller shows how the Rand-Branden affair began and made it pretty clear that, notwithstanding her marriage, Rand had a deep emotional attachment to a man who was nearly young enough to be her son. The more you learn about that, the more you realize that the real lesson of the break that occurred in 1968 is, quite simply, Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

Perhaps the saddest figure in Heller’s tale, though, is Rand’s husband, Frank O’Connor. A modestly successful actor when the two first met in the 1920s, O’Connor quickly put his career, and whatever ambitions he may have had aside in favor of his wife. He was by her side during the most difficult days of writing both of her masterpieces, and, at least on the surface, agreed with her on every essential. All the same, though, it’s clear that he never really had a say on the major decisions in their life — whether it was moving from California back to New York while Atlas Shrugged was being written, or what must have been the bizarre conversation where Rand argued that it was entirely logical for her to cheat on her husband. In later years, O’Connor turned to painting and, apparently, alcohol as life in the Ayn Rand’s world became more and more bizarre. One wonders what might have become of him under different circumstances.

The Rand true believers will not like this book, and they will argue that it is incomplete in some respect or another, although it’s worth noting that part of that incompleteness can be blamed on the decision by Rand’s estate to refuse to give Heller access to Rand’s papers as part of her research for the book. But if you’re someone who’s fascinated by Rand, or just someone who wants to read a good book about an amazing life, this is definitely a book you should pick up.